Abstract
Solar vapor generation is emerging as one of the most important sustainable techniques for harvesting clean water using abundant and green solar energy. The rational design of solar evaporators to realize high solar evaporation performances has become a great challenge. Here, a porous solar evaporator with integrative optimization of photothermal convention, water transport and thermal management is developed using attractive Pickering emulsions gels (APEG) as templated and followed by interfacial engineering on a molecular scale. The APEG-templated porous evaporators (APEG-TPEs) are intrinsically thermal insulation materials with a thermal conductivity = 0.039 W·m−1·K−1. After hydrolysis, t-butyl groups on the inner-surface are transformed to carboxylic acid groups, making the inner-surface hydrophilic and facilitating water transport through the inter-connected pores. The introduction of polypyrrole layer endows the porous materials with a high light absorption of ~97%, which could effectively convert solar irradiation to heat. Due to the versatility of the APEG systems, the composition, compressive modulus, porosity of APEG-TPEs could be well controlled and a high solar evaporation efficiency of 69% with an evaporation rate of 1.1 kg·m−2·h−1 is achieved under simulated solar irradiation. The interface-engineered APEG-TPEs are promising in clean water harvesting and could inspire the future development of solar evaporators.
Highlights
Clean water shortage is a global issue, impeding sustainable development and threatening human survival [1,2,3,4]
Great efforts have been devoted to the developments of advanced solar evaporators with high utilization efficiency of solar irradiation for clean water harvesting
The results show great potentials of the attractive Pickering emulsions gels (APEG)-TPEs for the future developments of solar evaporators
Summary
Clean water shortage is a global issue, impeding sustainable development and threatening human survival [1,2,3,4]. Water purification via water evaporation using abundant solar energy is regarded as a green and sustainable technology to address the challenge of water shortage [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Great efforts have been devoted to the developments of advanced solar evaporators with high utilization efficiency of solar irradiation for clean water harvesting. Heat transfer and water transport are the three main factors, which need to be optimized to improve the utilization efficiency of solar energy for water evaporation [11,12,13,14]. The heat absorbed from sunlight irradiation is expected to heat up water to facilitate water evaporation, instead of transferring to the water reservoir. Thermal insulation materials are preferred to confine the heat at the surface and block undesired heat conduction to the water reservoir [27,28]
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