Overall statement:

The paper offers a steady-state mathematical model of concentrated PV/T desalination system. The simulations focused on different parameters such as solar irradiance, wind speed, etc. The evaluation parameters include power output, system efficiency and desalination rate. The mathematical model, simulation procedure and novel proposed design can all be of great benefit in advancing the field of PV/T, and solar energy utilization in water desalination.

The strengths

1) The paper offers a novel design (at the time of publication). The advantages of the design are illustrated through the discussion well and are illustrated in section 2.2. 2) The proposed design utilizes natural passive water for circulation. 3) The introduction is comprehensive as it offers a general overview, literature review of different types of PV/T systems, essentially the established research in the field at the time. The introduction eloquently shifts from type of PV/T to its applications. 4) The authors effectively highlight the novelty in the proposed system in section 2 of the article.

Weaknesses:

1. The introduction introduces water desalination coupled with PV/T and only gives background to other systems utilizing desalination. However, a simple introduction to the desalination process could assist the general audience understand the subject of the research.

Minor points:

1. Solar radiation in the figures could be rephrased to solar irradiance, which is more suitable [1].
2. The paper ends with a summary, conclusions or recommendations were not made.
3. The validation is reported but not displayed.

Future works:

I would say that the system is quite useful and have massive potential for improvement. The use of forced circulation nanofluids and other types of thermally conductive means is recommended. Moreover, conducting experiments of case studies for different environments & examination of different design considerations such as length, width, depth, etc. Finally, to include a validation of the model with experiments or other work, or simply the MAPE, or RE [2-3].

Overall, I believe that solar energy can be implemented in a wide range of industrial applications and certainly this includes water desalination [4]. This paper offers an interesting novel design to tap into that field. References:

[1] Duffie, J. A., & Beckman, W. A. (2013). Solar engineering of thermal processes. John Wiley & Sons. [2] Gang, P., Huide, F., Tao, Z., & Jie, J. (2011). A numerical and experimental study on a heat pipe PV/T system. Solar energy, 85(5), 911-921. [3] Li, G., Pei, G., Ji, J., Yang, M., Su, Y., & Xu, N. (2015). Numerical and experimental study on a PV/T system with static miniature solar concentrator. Solar Energy, 120, 565-574. [4] Kabeel, A. E., & El-Agouz, S. A. (2011). Review of researches and developments on solar stills. Desalination, 276(1-3), 1-12.

• This is a post-publication review. The adherence to journal guidelines is not considered as the paper has already been processed by editorial team of the journal