Their pitch is that while this solution makes less water volume and requires more energy than existing solutions, it doesn't have consumable filters or require regular maintenance for cleaning. So you can just plug it into a solar panel, collect the water, and forget about it, versus needing to have someone trained to maintain the system and supplied with spare parts. I'm not sure I buy this because it seems like you'd still need to have pre-filters that need maintenance and/or replacement, and it seems like it would be a better use of time and money to just improve RO systems, but at least in theory it does have a value proposition.

The way it's described in the article was pretty clear that it pushes all contaminates, including solids, away from a particular zone on the membrane - and that's where the uncontaminated water is harvested from.

So no, it doesn't sound like it needs pre-filters. Obviously the fewer contaminates the easier/faster it will probably work. A simple settling tank would dramatically reduce the really big stuff and the rest sounds like it would be trivial for this tech to deal with. It's a very interesting technology!

Given that TFA says that RO is 3-4x more efficient, maybe it's 9Wh/L?