Solar-driven steam generation has been considered as a prevalent and sustainable approach to obtain clean fresh water. However, the presence of microorganisms in seawater may cause the biofouling and degradation...

As a typical type of melanin-inspired materials, polydopamine (PDA) has been widely used in photothermal conversion and energy harvesting applications due to its broad spectral absorption feature, but its limited absorption in the visible light region severely hinders further utilization. Although enhancing the visible light absorption and photothermal performance of PDA is urgent, it is quite difficult to achieve this goal via structural tailoring strategies because of the complicated and disordered structure within PDA. To address this issue, we reported a facile approach involving nitrogen-containing heterocycles toward the design of two new kinds of PDA nanomaterials. The introduction of nitrogen-containing heterocycles greatly reduced the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital of the molecular segments and then promoted electron delocalization in the local area. We verified the changes of energy bandgap and exciton decay of nitrogen-containing heterocycle-doped PDA through spectral analysis, density functional theory calculation, and electrostatic potential distribution on the molecular surface. Therefore, these heterocycle-doped PDAs exhibited improved visible light absorption and photothermal performances, which can be used in solar power generation applications. This work provides new opportunities for the rational design and structural tailoring of bioinspired photothermal materials.

Solar-driven vapor generation has emerged as a promising wastewater remediation technology for clean water production. However, the complicated and diversified contaminants in wastewater still restrict its practical applications. Herein, inspired...

No abstract

Constructing a donor–acceptor (D–A) structure is a common strategy to change the polarizability and dipole moment of local molecules and induce the re-hybridization of molecular orbitals, which could lead to the reduction of the bandgap and promote the transfer of electrons. Although such a strategy has been successfully applied in organic optoelectronics with well-defined molecular structures, very limited progress has been reported for polymers with disordered and complex structures. In this work, we strived to employ this strategy to manipulate the light absorption and photothermal behaviors of melanin-inspired, polydopamine (PDA), a typical kind of electron-rich molecular systems by involving a strong receptor unit, trichloroisocyanuric acid through covalent connection to construct D–A pairs. This design could decrease the bandgap and improve the optical absorption by orbital re-hybridization, which has been carefully verified by detailed spectral analysis and simulated calculation. The remarkable photothermal performances present promising potential in photothermal Marangoni actuators and solar power generation and provided new opportunities for the rational design of the microstructure of melanin.