Abstract
Water scarcity in mass populated areas has become a major global threat to the survival and sustainability of community life on earth, which needs the prompt attention of technological leadership. Solar evaporation has emerged as a renewable energy resource and a novel technique for clean water production and wastewater treatment. Indeed, mounting a scalable solar evaporator including high evaporation efficiency and thermal management remains a significant challenge. Herein, we demonstrate a self-floatable, ecofriendly polypyrrole/wood sponge-based (PPy@WS) steam generator. The low-cost and easy to fabricate evaporator system consists of a single-step in situ polymerization of a 2-D (two-dimensional) hydrophilic wood sponge abundantly available for commercialization. The as-prepared PPy@WS solar evaporator exhibits excellent wettability and is super hydrophilic (contact angle ∼ 0), salt-resistant, and has an excellent light absorption of ∼94% due to omnidirectional diffusion reflection in PPy Nanoparticles (NPs). The capacity of the PPy@WS evaporator to absorb broadband solar radiation and convert it into thermal energy has enabled it to achieve excellent surface temperature (38.6 °C). The accumulated heat can generate vapors at the rate of 1.62 kg·m−2·h−1 along with 93% photothermal conversion efficiency under one sun (1 kW·m−2). Moreover, the presented prototype possesses the capability to be installed directly without the use of any complex protocol to purify seawater or sewage with an efficient rejection ratio of primary metal ions present in seawater (approximately 100%). This simple fabrication process with renewable polymer resources and photothermal materials can serve as a practical model towards high-performance solar evaporation technology for water-stressed communities in remote areas.
Highlights
Freshwater has a pivotal role in the existence and survival of life on earth
Solar-driven water desalination is recognized as a minimum invasive solution to the foresaid problematic scenario due to abundant and inexhaustible energy resources
Efficient harvesting of solar energy over a wide spectral range is a key factor for producing purified fresh water in a remote area where the sun is the only abundant energy source [7]
Summary
Freshwater has a pivotal role in the existence and survival of life on earth. The absence of quantity and quality of freshwater can phase out the continuity of civic life over the entire and only living planet [1]. The interfacial evaporation approach has been assessed recently as a new technology for heat localization at the liquid-air interface instead of volumetric heating to minimize thermal losses, and output efficiency reaches 90% even under lower solar intensity [13,14] This method selectively heats the evaporation portion of water, reduces the amount of photothermal material amount, exhibits great potential in optimizing the usage of solar energy, and offers additional means for engineering the solar evaporating device, which highly depends on the thermal management and control of heat losses [15]. We propose interfacial polypyrrole (PPy) deposited composite woody sponge as a self-floating, lightweight, thermally insulated, flexible, and highly efficient solar-thermal conversion steam generation device. The pitch-black PPy photothermal layer exhibits outstanding thermal insulation (0.2753 ± 0.001 W·m−1·K−1), super hydrophilicity, and salt tolerance/stability under intense seawater conditions
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