A Boundary-Aware Synthesis of Thermally Driven Carbon-Membrane Desalination: Robust Evaluation under Distribution Shift

Abstract

A central challenge in thermally driven carbon-membrane desalination is to compare studies whose mechanisms and validation settings do not share a single denominator. The present review uses a monolayer array of carbon nanotubes as nanoscale transport pores and coupling a temperature gradient with graphene-channel surface wettability as focal cases for a boundary-aware synthesis. A structured reading of two target studies and 12 verified companion references is conducted across five lenses: thermal driving, surface wettability, pore architecture, selectivity, membrane fabrication. Emphasis is placed on the provenance of evidence, the comparability of baselines, and the consequences of alternative explanations. The combined literature indicates that methodological gains become actionable only when thermal driving and surface wettability are evaluated together and when limits associated with membrane fabrication are explicit. This shifts the emphasis from isolated scores toward traceable chains of evidence and decision relevance. 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.