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Boosting clean water evaporation and sustainable water treatment by photothermally induced artificial system

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Abstract

Efficiently harnessing abundant and renewable solar energy for sustainable and continuous municipal sewage or industrial outlet water treatment to deal with water crisis has been an urgency for researchers in the past decades. Herein, a scalable and cost-effective solar steam device built up of surface-carbonized cane (CC) and Bi2WO6 nanoflower photocatalyst is demonstrated, which exhibits high efficiency for concurrent waste water treatment and solar-to-water evaporation. CC is chosen as artificial core component in this system due to its nature-made periodic micro-/nanochannels, low heat conductivity, which contributes to extraordinary water transport, evaporation capacity and thermal management. Compared to natural cane, CC exhibits remarkably enhanced light absorption capacity and solar-to-water evaporation efficiency. Moreover, through the modification of Bi2WO6 nanoflower, the system shows an optimized utilization of absorbed photons for high redox charge carriers in photocatalytic degradation and heat generation to promote the water treatment, leading to enhanced pollutant degradation efficiency. The steam generation performance reaches up to 1.417 kg·m−2·h−1 and solar-to-water evaporation efficiency of ~ 91.7% under 1 sun irradiation, which are among the highest values in the literatures. Continuous water purification and freshwater production from municipal sewage are also carried out in a home-made tandem system.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22275074), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51702126) and Qin Shen Scholar Program of Jiaxing University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Biological, Chemical Sciences and Engineering, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing, 314001, Zhejiang, China

    Shi Wang, Mengli Li & Xuebo Cao

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

    Chenyang Dang

  3. School of Materials and Textile Engineering, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing, 314001, Zhejiang, China

    Shi Wang & Li Gu

  4. College of Advanced Materials Engineering, Jiaxing Nanhu University, Jiaxing, 314001, Zhejiang, China

    Jun Wu

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  1. Shi Wang
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Contributions

SW contributed to conceptualization, methodology, investigation and writing-original draft. CD contributed to methodology, software and investigation. JW performed data curation. ML contributed to conceptualization, data curation, writing—original draft, and writing—review and editing. LG performed supervision and project administration. XC contributed to supervision, funding acquisition and manuscript final version approval.

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Correspondence to Mengli Li or Xuebo Cao.

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Wang, S., Dang, C., Li, M. et al. Boosting clean water evaporation and sustainable water treatment by photothermally induced artificial system. J Mater Sci 58, 16105–16118 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-023-09029-7

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