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Superhydrophilic Polydopamine-Modified Carbon-Fiber Membrane with Rapid Seawater-Transferring Ability for Constructing Efficient Hanging-Model Evaporator

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Abstract

Solar-driven seawater desalination has attracted much attention for alleviating global freshwater shortage, but the practical application is often limited by complicated fabrication processes, unsatisfactory seawater-transferring and severe salt accumulation on the photothermal membranes. To solve these problems, hydrophobic industrial-grade carbon fiber membrane (CFM) with good photoabsorption was surface-modified with polydopamine (PDA) to prepare superhydrophilic CFM@PDA for the construction of efficient hanging-model evaporators without salt accumulation. The coating of PDA on CFM is realized by simple self-polymerization of dopamine, and the as-prepared CFM@PDA exhibits high solar absorption efficiency of 96.7%, good photothermal effect and superhydrophilicity. Especially, when CFM@PDA is hanging between two water tanks (one contains seawater and the other is empty) in a flat hanging-model evaporator, it can transport seawater at a high rate (26.35 g/h) which is 3.6 times that (7.28 g/h) of commercial cotton fabric. Under simulated sunlight (1.0 kW m−2) irradiation, CFM@PDA shows a high evaporation rate of 1.79 kg m−2 h−1 with a solar evaporation efficiency of 92.6%. Even if NaCl solution with a high concentration (21.0 wt%) is used for the evaporation, the hanging CFM@PDA can retain a high evaporation rate (~ 1.80 kg m−2 h−1) without salt accumulation during the long-time test (8 h), which is significantly better than that of the tradition floating model. Therefore, this study not only demonstrates the simple preparation of superhydrophilic CFM@PDA, but also promotes the further practical applications of hanging-model evaporators for continuous salt-free desalination.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially by National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFB3804902, 2022YFB3804900), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52161145406, 51972056), Program of Shanghai Academic Research Leader (20XD1420200), the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (21ZR1402500).

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  1. Wenmei Chong and Ruru Meng have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620, China

    Wenmei Chong, Ruru Meng, Zixiao Liu, Qiyue Liu, Jinjing Hu, Bo Zhu, Daniel K. Macharia & Zhigang Chen

  2. College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620, China

    Lisha Zhang

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Contributions

WC: conceptualization, investigation, writing-original draft, writing-review and editing. RM: investigation, validation, writing-original draft. ZL: investigation. QL: data curation. JH: validation. BZ: investigation. DKM: investigation. ZC: supervision, project administration, writing-review and editing. LZ: supervision, project administration, writing-review and editing.

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Chong, W., Meng, R., Liu, Z. et al. Superhydrophilic Polydopamine-Modified Carbon-Fiber Membrane with Rapid Seawater-Transferring Ability for Constructing Efficient Hanging-Model Evaporator. Adv. Fiber Mater. 5, 1063–1075 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42765-023-00276-6

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