Pure water production by solar distillation under no light concentration is attracting ever greater attention in the rural area with electricity limit due to its constant energy input. Meanwhile, the polluted raw water in these areas also lacks effective decontamination treatment. Rather than relying on external steps for decontamination process, photothermal materials with pollutant removal ability would have better water cleaning performance. Here, we designed a multifunctional photothermal material based on a copper mesh with abundant CuO nanowires. This CuO nanowire mesh exhibited a high solar absorption of 93% and superhydrophilicity for water transport, contributing to a high solar vapor efficiency of 84.4% under onesun illumination. Besides, the CuO nanowires possessed a great catalytic ability for the degradation of contaminants in raw water. Moreover, the diffusion inhibition test showed a clear antimicrobial effect of the CuO nanowire mesh on the bacteria. Hence, the as-prepared multifunctional CuO nanowire mesh allows for the incorporation of solar evaporation, pollutant degradation, and antibacterial action, which holds great application potential in the pure water production in solar distillation.
Solar distillation through photothermal
evaporators has approached
solar light energy (E1) limit under no solar concentration
but still suffers from modest vapor and clean water production. Herein,
a nature-inspired low-tortuosity three-dimensional (3D) evaporator
is demonstrated to significantly improve water production. The solar
evaporator, prepared from polypyrrole-modified maize straw (PMS),
had upright vascular structures enabling high water lifting and horizontal
microgaps facilitating broad water distribution to the out-surface.
Consequently, this novel PMS evaporator dramatically enhanced the
utilization of the solar heat energy stored in the environment (E2) for promoting evaporation. The maximum vapor generation
rate of a single PMS respectively increases 2.5 and 6 times compared
with the conventional 3D evaporators and the planar evaporators of
an identical occupied area. Consequently, a scaled-up PMS array achieved
a state-of-the-art vapor generation rate of 3.0 L m–2 h–1 (LMH) under a simulated condition and a record-high
clean water production of 2.2 LMH for actual seawater desalination
under natural conditions (1 sun intensity). This breakthrough reveals
great potentials for cost-effective freshwater production as well
as the rational design of high-performance photothermal evaporators
for solar distillation.
Solar-driven
interfacial evaporation (SIE) is emerging as an energy-efficient
technology to alleviate the global water shortages. However, there
is a fatal disadvantage in using SIE, that is, the volatile organic
compounds (VOCs) widely present in feedwater would concurrently evaporate
and transport in distilled water, which threatens the water safety.
Photocatalysis is a sustainable technology for pollution control,
and after years of development, it has become a mature method. Considering
the restriction by the insufficient reaction of the permeating VOCs
on the two-dimensional (2D) light-available interface of conventional
materials, a 3D photocatalytic approach can be established to boost
VOC rejection for photothermal evaporation. In the present work, a
light-permeable solar evaporator with 3D photocatalytic sites is constructed
by a porous sponge decorated with BiOBrI nanosheets with oxygen-rich
vacancies. The 3D microchannels in the evaporator provide a light-permeable
path with the deepest irradiation depth of about 580 μm, and
the reactive interface is increased by tens of times compared with
the traditional 2D membrane, resulting in suppression of VOC remnants
in distilled water by around four orders of magnitude. When evaporating
river water containing 5 mg L–1 extra added phenol,
no phenol residues (below 0.001 mg/L) were detected in the produced
freshwater. This development is believed to provide a powerful strategy
to resolve the VOC bottleneck of SIE.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.