Passive solar-thermal interfacial crystallizer using laser-textured superwicking black metal
#00056
A femtosecond-laser-textured aluminium panel wicks seawater uphill across its face, absorbs ~92% of sunlight to evaporate it, and uses the coffee-ring effect plus salt creeping to push crystallised salt to the panel edges — self-cleaning, no membranes, no chemicals, no electricit
#00061Demonstrated only at centimetre lab scale over days — deployment-scale, multi-year durability is unproven
The evidence is a 9 cm² panel run for ~9 hours outdoors and a lab unit run for 7 days. Real deployment needs square-metre panels surviving years of seawater: aluminium corrosion, biofouling, laser-texture wear, mechanical robustness, and field salt-harvesting are all untested.
#00060Passive solar throughput (~10 L/m²/day) means collector area scales directly with population served
Solar evaporation yields ~10 L/m²/day outdoors—near the physical ceiling, not an engineering gap. Full domestic use (~50–100 L/person/day) requires 5–10 m² per person; a 10,000-person town needs 5–10 hectares. This bounds the technology to household/hamlet scale, not municipal su