Efficient solar-driven interfacial water evaporation enabled wastewater remediation by carbonized sugarcane

Abstract

Solar-driven interfacial water evaporation has great potential in wastewater remediation. Carbonized biomass materials emerged as attractive solar evaporators due to their excellent solar harvesting, solar-thermal converting, and water delivering capabilities. In this study, antimony doped tin oxide (ATO) was loaded to sugarcane that was then carbonized to obtain composite solar evaporator CS@ATO which delivered a solar absorption of 99 %, a solar evaporation rate of 1.43 kg m−2 h−1 and an efficiency of 95.3 %. Treated with CS@ATO, the concentrations of heavy metal ions in wastewater were reduced by 3–4 orders, and dyes in wastewater were removed almost completely. For seawater desalination with CS@ATO, the contents of the main cations in the collected fresh water were lower than the levels in drinking water defined by WHO. CS@ATO also exhibited long-term service capability in both wastewater remediation and seawater desalination. These results suggested great potential of CS@ATO in the aforementioned environment related applications.