Thermally Driven Carbon-Membrane Desalination beyond Nominal Performance: Mechanisms, Uncertainty, and Deployment

Abstract

Research spanning thermally driven carbon-membrane desalination increasingly joins methods that were developed for different objects and decisions. Here, a monolayer array of carbon nanotubes as nanoscale transport pores is compared with coupling a temperature gradient with graphene-channel surface wettability to determine which claims can travel across those boundaries and which remain context dependent. Two target papers are triangulated against 12 locally validated publications. The comparison follows thermal driving, surface wettability, pore architecture, selectivity, membrane fabrication and deliberately separates mechanistic interpretation from performance ranking, because the latter can conceal incompatible experimental or operational conditions. The synthesis shows that thermal driving cannot be interpreted independently of surface wettability, while pore architecture determines whether an apparent improvement remains meaningful outside the original setting. The strongest claims are therefore those that expose sensitivity, failure conditions, and residual uncertainty. The contribution is a decision-oriented synthesis that connects method selection to failure cost and treats reproducibility, provenance, and bounded generalization as first-order design requirements.