Solar-driven co-generation of electricity and water by evaporation cooling

Solar-driven evaporation has attracted increasing interest due to its broad applications, including desalination, power generation, steam sterilization, and solar fuel production. Among them, electricity generation and water production are urgently required, especially in remote regions lacking electricity and fresh water. In this work, we designed a novel hybrid system of a solar photovoltaic (PV) panel backside coupled with a multistage membrane distiller (MD), for co-generation of electricity and fresh water. Within this hybrid PV-MD system, the generated heat in the PV panel is effectively removed by evaporation cooling to reduce the working temperature, thus leading to higher solar-to-electricity efficiency. In addition, the discharged heat can be recovered to drive the multistage MD for fresh water production. Under one sun, the hybrid system outputted electricity power of 66.6 W m−2 with a resistance of 10 Ω and produced fresh water with a rate of 1.11 kg m−2 h−1 with four stages. Thus, this system can be readily implemented in current photovoltaic modules as a retrofit to improve the PV efficiency and water production.