Abstract
The use of solar-driven interfacial evaporation for seawater desalination and wastewater treatment is a promising solution to the pressing freshwater crisis. However, the challenge of developing low-cost, easy-to-make, scalable, and high-performance evaporators for efficient steam generation and stable desalination remains enormous. Herein, a cellulose-based carbon paper (CBCP) with outstanding flexibility and structural stability was successfully prepared by a simple and scalable strategy. The formation of ice crystals during the freeze-drying process effectively enlarges and links the pores among cellulose-based fibers, which would facilitate the evaporation and salt-rejecting capability of the as-obtained photothermal paper. The hierarchical porous structure, high light absorption, and excellent solar-thermal conversion capability give CBCP superior interfacial evaporation performance to produce clean water from a wide range of water sources, including real seawater, high salt wastewater, and dye-contained wastewater. The evaporator achieves a high evaporation rate of 1.25 kg m−2 h−1 (energy conversion efficiency of 80.6%) for real seawater under one sun irradiation and has good salt-rejecting capability. During 10 evaporation cycles (100 h in total), the obtained evaporation rate keeps constant around 1.31 kg m−2 h−1. In addition, about 7.7 kg m−2 of freshwater was produced from seawater per day in the outdoor evaporation test. These significant advantages will give CBCP great potential for practical solar-assisted desalination and wastewater purification.
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This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 52020105007 and 51606027), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (DUT22LAB112), and the Liaoning Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2020-MS-119). Z. L. was supported by the Xinghai Talent funding and the Dalian High-Level Talent Innovation Program (2021RQ035).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by CS, WL, YZ and ZL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by CS and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Shi, C., Luo, W., Zhang, Y. et al. Scalable and flexible biomass-derived photothermal paper for efficient solar-assisted water purification. Cellulose 30, 7193–7204 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-023-05326-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-023-05326-1