Lamellar Wood Sponge with Vertically Aligned Channels for Highly Efficient and Salt-Resistant Solar Desalination

Abstract

Solar-assisted interfacial evaporation is a promising approach for purifying and desalinating water. As a sustainable biomass material, wood has attracted increasing interest as an innovative substrate for solar desalination, owing to its intrinsic porous structure, high hydrophilicity, and low thermal conductivity. However, developing wood-based solar evaporators with high evaporation rates and excellent salt resistance still remains a significant challenge, owing to the absence of large pores with high interconnectivity in natural wood. Herein, by converting the honeycombed structure of natural wood into a lamellar architecture via structural engineering, we develop a flexible wood sponge with vertically aligned channels for efficient and salt-resistant solar desalination after surface coating with carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The special lamellar structure with an interlayer distance of 50–300 μm provides the wood sponge with faster water transport, lower thermal conductivity, and water evaporation enthalpy, thus achieving higher evaporation performances in comparison with the cellular structure of natural wood. Noteworthy, the vertically aligned channels of the wood sponge facilitate sufficient fluid convection and diffusion and enable efficient salt exchanges between the heating interface and the underlying bulk water, thus preventing salt accumulation on the surface. Benefiting from the distinctive lamellar structure, the developed wood-sponge evaporator exhibits exceptional salt resistance even in a hypersaline brine (20 wt %) during continuous 7-day desalination under 1 sun irradiation, with a high evaporation rate (1.38–1.43 kg m–2 h–1), outperforming most previously reported wood-based evaporators. The lamellar wood sponge may provide a promising strategy for desalinating high-salinity brines in an efficient manner.