Abstract
Downward solar evaporation with multistage configurations is a promising off-grid solution for high-efficiency potable water production. However, a major, yet often overlooked, barrier to practical application is the significant, unquantified performance gap between laboratory benchmarks and field operation, arising from the complex environmental factors. To diagnose this gap, this work first introduces the Environmental Robustness Index (ERI), the ratio of field-to-lab normalized water productivity (P’), as an essential metric. A comprehensive framework is then developed to precisely quantify the effect of key environmental factors, including wind, sky cooling, and ambient temperature, on the ERI. Guided by the framework, we present the spectrally selective air lock strategy as a universal principle to suppress environmental heat losses and improve ERIs. Implementing this strategy significantly enhances downward solar evaporator’s ERIs from 0.55 to 0.98, effectively closing the gap. This study establishes a framework for solar evaporation to move beyond reporting P’lab alone and utilize (P’lab, ERI) as the dual metrics for advancing real-world applicability.
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Data availability
The data supporting the findings of the study are included in the main text and supplementary information files. Source Data file has been deposited in Figshare under accession code https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3097685853 Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The code developed to simulate heat and mass transfer in MSD modules is freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1860812154
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship (PF21-57442, C.W.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52300020, W.W.), Basic and Applied Basic Research Project of Guangzhou (2024A04J4445, W.W.), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Sun Yat-sen University (24hytd006, W.W.), Innovation Group Project of Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) (SML2023SP222, J.C.), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2024M753744, W.W.), and Agilent Applications and Core Technology – University Research Grant (#5108, P.W.). The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University for funding this work through the Visiting researcher Program (A.B.).
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C.W. and W.W. designed and directed the research. C.W. and Z.L. synthesized the aerogels. C.W. and C.L. conducted experiments. C.W. performed simulations. C.W., Y.L., C.L., J.C., B.L., A.B., K.B.B., S.A., M.A.A., S.L., N.G., Q.G., W.W., and P.W. all contributed to writing and revising the paper.
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Wang, Ct., Lin, C., Xu, K. et al. Engineering high environmental robustness in solar evaporation to bridge the lab-to-field performance gap.
Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71004-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71004-y
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