ZrB2 assembled all-ceramic solar steam evaporator employing aluminum silicate ceramic fiberboard as a supporting substrate for highly efficient desalination

Abstract

Metal ceramic nitrides, as a category of low-cost, refractory and conductive metal-ceramics, have attracted great attention in plasmonics application for solar-thermal steam generation. However, there are still other classes of refractory metal ceramics that should be investigated. A retrieval of literature shows that they are not expected to be as promising as metal ceramic nitrides and thus are neglected in photothermal interfacial evaporation (PTIE). Based on the above reasons, we selected ZrB2 nanoparticles (NPs) as a solar absorber to evaluate the promising application of metal ceramic borides in PTIE for the first time. By employing aluminium silicate ceramic fibreboard (ASCF), which is commonly adopted in heat preservation as a supporting substrate, the fabricated ZrB2@ASCF possesses advantages in thermal stability, wettability, heat-insulation, photo-thermal conversion and stable hosting of nanoscale absorbers when applied in production practice. The desalination experiment demonstrates that the evaporation rate of our assembled ZrB2@ASCF evaporator under an irradiation intensity of 1 sun is as high as 2.07 kg m-2h−1, which is even higher than the majority of previously reported works. Manually drilling channel arrays, although they have some negative impacts on the evaporation rate, indeed improve the durability to at least 40 h in the continuous desalination of saline water (salinity 3.5%), thus enhancing the salt-rejection capability of our evaporator.