Reverse Tesla valve modulated efficient water evaporation and cooling

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Abstract
Water evaporation, a physical process effectively driving natural hydrological cycles, has long suffered from rate limitations in industrial applications. Particularly in scenarios such as solar steam generation and evaporation cooling, the evaporation rate of conventional evaporators struggles to meet the practical request, due to the unresolved boundary layer resistance at the liquid-air interface. Here, we reinvent Nikola Tesla's fluidic diode into a reverse Tesla valve modulated bulk-effect evaporation system (BEES). By leveraging structure-induced vortex airflow to disrupt thermal and mass transfer boundary layers, BEES unlocks previously unattainable evaporation dynamics at the inner liquid-air interface and achieves an evaporation rate of 21.29 kg m-2 h-1, with a total energy/solar efficiency of 627%. Our BEES enables all-day freshwater harvesting and efficient evaporative cooling, achieving energy savings of 414 GJ m-3 month-1. This work establishes a bulk-effect evaporation framework complementary to traditional interfacial engineering for addressing the water-energy nexus.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (52175266 & 52575327)

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