Congratulations to Lenan Zhang, Yang Zhong, and their collaborators in China, including DRL alumnus Zhenyuan Xu, for their work on extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distillation with thermohaline convection being recognized as the Best Inventions of 2023 by Time Magazine and featured as the Top MIT research stories of 2023 on MIT News! This work, which drew inspiration from thermohaline convection of ocean currents,  demonstrated a record-high desalination efficiency over a wide range of salinity levels (0 to 20 wt%). More importantly, the desalination system demonstrates an extreme resistance to salt accumulation and an extended lifetime, which for the first time shows that a solar-thermal system can produce freshwater at a cost even cheaper than tap water. 

Read more on Time Magazine, MIT News, and read the paper here. Notably, this research is an extension of our previous desalination project, highlighted as the Top MIT research stories of 2020 by MIT News.