Plant-inspired multi-environmentally adaptive, flexible, and washable solar steam generation fabric

Abstract

Interfacial solar water evaporation has been widely fabricated for water treatment owing to its great promise in harvesting fresh water with clean energy in need for carbon neural target. However, developing an evaporator with recyclability under severe contamination and adaptability for various complex aqueous environments, remains challenging. Herein, inspired by mangrove forest growing in salty shoals, an adaptive tree-like evaporator (ATE) was fabricated by rolling cotton threads and punched (pin-holed) carbon nanotube (CNT) film into modified photothermal bundles and further weaving them into root-leaf like structure, enabling uncoated cotton bundles as dense roots for extracting and transporting water and coated part as leaves with open holes for evaporation. Such a facile ATE showed stable water evaporation rate, and an excellent salt-self-cleaning performance. Importantly, the ATE was also available to extract and evaporate wastewater from some severe environments, such as mud, sand, emulsion and dye solution. The ATEs were scalable, and particularly proved to be flexible and robust for washing and reusing, with evaporation performance almost unchanged after 100 cycles. This work has demonstrated a prototype for an efficient, adaptive and scalable fabric evaporator for solar-driven wastewater treatment, opening the possibility to solve provisional freshwater supply in poverty-stricken or polluted areas.