Design of stability and cost-effective Ti3C2/cotton architecture for solar steam generation

Abstract

Solar steam generation is an economical, environmentally friendly, promising method for producing freshwater from seawater. However, solar steam generation is still limited by high material cost and poor stability. Designing an evaporator with cost-effectiveness and stable structure is highly desired. Here, single-layer Ti3C2 (SL-Ti3C2) nanosheets were prepared by ball milling and then mixed with cotton (SL-Ti3C2/cotton) to obtain a stable evaporator. Due to the broadband absorption of SL-Ti3C2 and the multi-scale absorption of incident light, the prepared solar evaporator showed high light absorption of 97.18 %. Combined with the cotton-assisted water transport, the evaporation rate of the evaporator reached 1.32 kg m−2 h−1 and 7.08 kg m−2 h−1 under 1 sun and 5 sun illumination, respectively. Furthermore, our evaporator could be used continuously more than 30 times, which exhibited good durability and desalination performance. Simultaneously, due to the cheap cotton and ultra-small count addition of SL-Ti3C2, the evaporator shows a high cost-effectiveness of 776 g/h/$, far beyond previously reported solar evaporation systems. It is worth noting that the evaporator could separate freshwater from simulates heavy metal ions and organic solutions. This simple preparation solar absorber shows great potential for water treatment and seawater desalination.