Solar-driven evaporators for water treatment: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Solar-driven evaporation is an emerging process to acquire freshwater from saline water or wastewater, in which photothermal materials play a crucial role. Significant effort has been devoted to promoting energy...

Photothermal Devices for Sustainable Uses Beyond Desalination

“…The former requires high water evaporation efficiency that is related to the evaporation surface area, heat management, and latent thermal recycling. [15] The latter should modulate the pore structures or wettability to regulate the water flow direction. Xiao et al designed a bilayer CNT film/cellulose paper asymmetrically decorated with hydrophobic PDMS, which could realize the directional water flow and ensure the evaporation surface (Figure 5a).…”

“…Solar-driven evaporation experiences an evolution from bulk heating by dispersed nanomaterials to localized heating by an interfacial evaporator, and great progress in this field has been made over the past years, including the development of novel photothermal materials with wide light absorption and efficient light-to-heat conversion, good thermal management for high heat utilization and evaporation efficiency, and inhibition of salt scaling for long-term operation. [13][14][15] With the development of photothermal materials and devices, scientists turn their attention to other energy and environment applications that can be driven by solar thermal power (Scheme 1). For example, the thermal energy from light-to-heat conversion can be used to lower the viscosity of crude oil during the spill removal or petroleum transportation [16,17] or melt the ice formed on the surface under cold climate.…”

Adjustable photothermal device induced by magnetic field for efficient solar‐driven desalination

“…[29][30][31][32][33][34] Thanks to a series of intensive researches, the novel photothermal materials/devices in recent reports have reached a desired efficiency of solar-driven evaporation and showed a broad development prospect in wastewater treatment and desalination. [35][36][37][38] However, some issues still do exist limiting the practical application. Firstly, there is usually a strong water demand during the preparation process of photothermal materials/devices.…”

Clean water generation through a multifunctional activated carbon-TiO2 interfacial solar distillation system

“…Through lattice vibrations in carbon materials, the incident photon energy can be converted into heat, 15 so they are generally considered to be superior light absorbers exhibiting good water evaporation efficiency. 16 Li et al recently utilized a commercially activated carbon ber material for efficient solar steam generation. 13 Despite continuous evolvement, the main weakness of solar distillation still exists when water contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as industrial effluents and groundwater, is used as the source water.…”