ABSTRACT The accelerating global demand for clean and affordable freshwater, intensified by climate change, rapid population growth, and increasing water scarcity, has driven strong interest in sustainable desalination technologies. Solar stills represent an attractive passive solution for decentralized, off‐grid freshwater production; however, their practical deployment is constrained by inherently low thermal efficiency and limited distillate yield. In recent years, the integration of magnetic fields (MFs) has emerged as an innovative, low‐energy enhancement strategy that actively intensifies evaporation and heat transfer processes. This review presents a comprehensive and critical synthesis of recent experimental and numerical investigations on MF‐enhanced solar desalination systems, including their coupling with phase‐change materials, thermal energy storage units, nanofluids, and heat transfer fins. The analyzed studies consistently demonstrate that magnetic augmentation can increase freshwater productivity by up to 88.7% and improve thermal efficiency by up to 87.27%, depending on magnet configuration, field intensity, and system architecture. Beyond thermal performance, magnetic enhancement also delivers clear technoeconomic and environmental benefits, including reduced energy consumption, lower distilled water costs, shorter payback periods, and meaningful reductions in CO 2 emissions. In addition to consolidating recent advances in system design and magnetothermal mechanisms, this review identifies key scientific bottlenecks hindering large‐scale deployment, notably the lack of standardized MF protocols and limited long‐term field validation. By highlighting emerging hybrid magnetothermal configurations and data‐driven optimization strategies, this work provides a forward‐looking framework to accelerate the translation of MF‐assisted solar desalination from laboratory‐scale prototypes to reliable, scalable freshwater production systems for water‐stressed regions worldwide.
Hussein et al. (Thu,) studied this question.