High-performance and scalable wood-based solar-driven interfacial evaporator with corrugated structure for continuous desalination

Abstract

Interfacial solar-driven evaporation of saline water is a promising technique that enables worldwide upscaling of freshwater with a minimum of carbon footprint. For this purpose, wood is demonstrating a desirable substrate due to its high porosity and low thermal conductivity. Despite much effort has been dedicated to improving the performance of wood evaporators, their scalability and reliability still restrict applications. Here we present a large-scale and highly-efficient wood-based evaporator with corrugated sheet structures using a facile mechanical processing strategy that utilizes the excellent processability of wood. The corrugated structure of the longitudinal wood block, transports water in the longitudinal direction and thereby increases the evaporation area. With the inclusion of a Chinese ink layer and hydrophobic treatment, the prepared wood-based evaporators exhibit a high evaporation rate (1.77 kg m−2 h−1 for spruce wood, 1.42 kg m−2 h−1 for beech wood) and efficiency (111.53% for spruce wood, 88.73% for beech wood) at 1 sun irradiation and continuous water desalination, which is superior to both reported longitudinal and most transverse wood-based evaporators. This work demonstrates a universal and economy strategy for preparing large-sized wood-based solar evaporators with processability, stable performance and high efficiency.