## 1 Introduction  
The International Energy Association (IEA) reported that more than 151.19 TWh of energy was consumed in 2016 for desalination in the United Arab Emirates [1]. This great demand reflects the water-energy nexus being faced by several countries throughout the world and stresses the need for research and the development of low-energy consuming desalination technologies. Desalination technologies are typically based on either thermal or membrane-based mechanisms, both of which have been reviewed extensively in the literature [2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7]. There has been a growing interest in thin-film evaporation technologies for cooling applications, electronic devices, perspiration, and more recently, for solar-assisted water desalination because they enable cost-efficient water vapor generation by utilizing solar irradiation in a relatively simple mechanism [8; 9; 10]. Thin-film evaporation utilized in solar-assisted desalination is governed by a phase change process in which water first penetrates into the nano/microsized pores of the membrane after which, it is driven through a passive capillary effect over a low resistance path. When the water enters the pores, a meniscus is formed inside each pore, which is typically comprised of three characteristic regions;(1) an absorbed region, in which a set of attractive forces exist between the liquid and the membrane wall forming the basis of the meniscus, (2) a transition region, in which the layer of water has a high curvature, forming low thermal resistance between the wall channel and the fluid, which causes better exploitation of the latent heat of evaporation and enhances evaporation, and (3) a bulk fluid/meniscus region, in which the curvature of the interface is constant, serving as a feed for the transition region in which the capillary forces are dominant [8; 10; 11]. Several studies investigated thin-film evaporation, with an emphasis on the interfacial transport and evaporative mechanisms; [PERSON] et al. [12] investigated the characteristics of evaporative heat transfer at a solid-liquid-vapor contact line, in which the wall temperature distribution beneath the meniscus was investigated experimentally, and demonstrated that the local heat flux at the three-phase region was 5.4-6.5 times greater than the average input heat flux of the heat source, and was attributed to a high rate of evaporation. In another study, [PERSON] et al. [13] demonstrated the behavior of a macroscopic contact angle of dielectric fluid at the three-phase contact line, under superheated state, and experimentally demonstrated that the macroscopic contact angle increased in a micro-region where the evaporation was carried out from the meniscus. However, he found numerically that the contact angle of the liquid-vapor interface was influenced by several parameters such as evaporation, capillary, and Van der Waals forces in the evaporation region. Moreover, [PERSON] et al. [14] studied the effect of negative pressure using ceramic nanoporous membranes whilst utilizing alcohol as a working fluid, in which the effective fluid transport was achieved through decoupling the viscous resistance from the capillary pressure. They demonstrated that the dissipating heat flux at the liquid-vapor interface could reach 96 W cm\({}^{-2}\), and provided guidance for the design which shows the relationship between the high interfacial heat flux performance (1000 W cm\({}^{-2}\)) and the membrane thicknesses. More recently, [PERSON] et al. [15] demonstrated the effects of different geometric parameters of anodic aluminum oxide nanoporous membranes on the heat transfer performance [11], in which the average pore diameter, porosity, and position of the meniscus in the pores of ceramic membranes were varied experimentally, and revealed that the evaporation flux enhanced when the volume porosity increased, due to the increased heat transfer area. However, they also demonstrated that the vapor resistance increases when the meniscus is pushed down within the pores.