Plant leaves inspired sunlight-driven purifier for high-efficiency clean water production

Geng, Hongya; Xu, Qian; Wu, Mingmao; Ma, Hongyun; Zhang, Panpan; Gao, Tiantian; Qu, Liangti; Ma, Tianbao; Li, Chun

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-09535-w

Cited by 185 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Geng et al recently demonstrated an interesting plant leaf inspired solar water purifier (Figure 10c), by means of transpiration/guttation effect triggered by sunlight, liquid clean water is repelled from the tailored PNPG‐F structure, offering an extremely high water collection of 4.2 kg m −2 h −1 under 1 sun. [ 127 ]…”

Section: Enhanced Solar Evaporationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure Architecting for Salt‐Rejecting Solar Interfacial Desalination to Achieve High‐Performance Evaporation With In Situ Energy Generation

et al. 2020

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requirement has given rise to research thrusts being focused on the development of solar-driven evaporation based desalination technologies. [4][5][6][7] The research on using solar energy in the desalination process has a long history. [3,8,9] In a traditional singleslope basin-like solar still (Figure 1a), saline water is heated and subsequently evaporated by directly exposing to solar radiation. Solar energy is absorbed and converted into thermal energy by a black light-absorbing liner that is situated at the bottom of the solar basin. [10] Due to this design, the solar absorber is immersed in bulk seawater and it hardly receives a fraction of the incoming solar radiation owing to poor light penetration through the thick water layer. Furthermore, the produced heat is easily dissipated into the bulk water, and further lost to the surroundings through water surface radiation, convection and conduction. Due to the above reasons, the resulting solar-tosteam conversion efficiency is inevitably low. Nanoparticle dispersed fluid was then demonstrated to harness solar energy and found to be a great boon to direct water vapor generation. [11,12] A solar conversion efficiency of up to ≈70% can be possibly achieved because heat loss to bulk water is mitigated ( Figure 1b). [13,14] However, research on this advancement didn't last because of the development of solar interfacial heating strategy, which is shown in Figure 1c. The concept of interfacial evaporation was first put forth in 2014 by two reports simultaneously, [15,16] and received a surge of attention and interest immediately in the following years. The most prominent feature of solar interfacial evaporation lies in the position of the solar absorber, which is at the interface between saline liquid and the above air. This special configuration not only minimizes heat loss from the solar absorber to bulk water, but also provides significantly more surface area for prompt vapor release. Also, solar radiation is photothermally localized at the surface of solar absorber, giving rise to high surface temperature, which enables fast heat transfer to water. With it, water transported from reservoir can be heated and evaporated immediately to achieve a higher rate of steam generation. In addition to the differences in heating strategies, it should be noted that all the solar stills follow the same evaporation-condensation route for desalination and clean water collection, and to this end, a similar device structure (e.g., solar still with sloping cover) is usually employed.The past few years have witnessed a rapid development of solar-driven interfacial evaporation, a promising technology for low-cost water desalination. As of today, solar-to-steam conversion efficiencies close to 100% or even beyond the limit are becoming increasingly achievable in virtue of unique photothermal materials and structures. Herein, the cutting-edge approaches are summarized, and their mechanisms for photothermal structure architecting are uncovered in order to achieve ultrahigh conversion e...

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Section: Enhanced Solar Evaporationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure Architecting for Salt‐Rejecting Solar Interfacial Desalination to Achieve High‐Performance Evaporation With In Situ Energy Generation

et al. 2020

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“…(iv) Polyurethane foam: The carrier molecules are made of foam with high mesoporous structure. It is efficient to treat wastewater because of the coating of hydrogels and aerogels [24]. (v) Biofilms: This type of carrier molecules utilizes photocatalytic materials along with their adherent microorganism to treat the wastewater.…”

Section: Carrier Moleculesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Photocatalysis for Wastewater Treatment with Special Emphasis on Plastic Degradation

Arumugam¹,

Meenkashisundaram²,

Sharma³

2020

Handbook of Nanomaterials and Nanocomposites for Energy and Environmental Applications

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Advanced oxidation process such as photocatalysis is seen as a potential future technology to offer clean water for various human needs. Through this process, different organic pollutants and recalcitrant chemicals are effectively removed from both water and wastewater. Some of the AOPs, such as ozonation (O 3), catalysis by iron ions, electrodes, metal oxides, UV/Fenton, UV/hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2), etc., generate harmful intermediates which restrict their full-scale implementation. Alternatively, irradiation techniques such as photocatalysis are a viable option and have shown to treat wastewater contaminated with hazardous chemicals, organic dyes, pesticides, antibiotics, viruses, bacteria, protozoa, etc., without producing toxic levels of by-products. This chapter reviews emerging aspects of photocatalysis for treatment of various recalcitrant pollutants with a special emphasis on polyethylene degradation. It summarizes the source, types, mechanism, and parameters of wastewater treatment using photocatalytic activity. Polyethylene is well known as serious cause of threats to human health and environment. Polyethylene, polystyrene, plastic film, and polypropylene degradation has been shown to occur via photocatalysis. This could be achieved using TiO 2 , ZnO, and doped and undoped metal oxides as photocatalysts. Also, photocatalytic degradation is compared with microbial techniques for polyethylene degradation along with brief reports on novel photobioreactors; a combination of microbial and photocatalytic reactors in degradation of polyethylene.

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“…Among various desalination technologies, such as reverse osmosis and ion exchange, the solar still is distinguishable due to its low energy consumption and little impairment on natural freshwater ecosystems 2, 3 . To promote practical application of the solar still, it has been long developed from bottom heating model, bulk heating model to interfacial heating model with increasing solar efficiency and reducing cost 3–8 . In the interfacial heating model, solar energy is localized at the evaporation surface by high light absorption and low thermal conduction to bulk water using a floating structure 9 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2,3 To promote practical application of the solar still, it has been long developed from bottom heating model, bulk heating model to interfacial heating model with increasing solar efficiency and reducing cost. [3][4][5][6][7][8] In the interfacial heating model, solar energy is localized at the evaporation surface by high light absorption and low thermal conduction to bulk water using a floating structure. 9 Attention has mainly focused on high absorption in the solar spectrum, low thermal loss from the evaporation surface and sufficient water supply for evaporation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing a bioinspired synthetic tree by unidirectional freezing for simultaneous solar steam generation and salt collection

Shao

Tang

et al. 2020

EcoMat

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Solar steam generation with thermal localization was recently proposed for highly efficient solar‐thermal desalination. However, to achieve high steam productivity with long term stability remains a critical challenge due to salt accumulation at the evaporation surface. Here, we designed a T‐shaped synthetic tree that could simultaneously achieve high steam productivity and salt collection with the structure characteristics of interfacial thermal evaporation, ambient energy harvesting and edge‐preferential crystallizing. Under 1 sun, the synthetic tree exhibited a steady water evaporation rate of 2.03 kg m−2 hours−1 over 60 hours, achieving solar thermal efficiency of 75%. Salt was continuously rejected at the edge of the evaporator with a steady collection rate of 59.879 g m−2 hours−1, which did not affect water evaporation. This new design principle to simultaneously harvest water and salt provides a new avenue for solar energy utilization.

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Plant leaves inspired sunlight-driven purifier for high-efficiency clean water production

Cited by 185 publications

References 53 publications

Structure Architecting for Salt‐Rejecting Solar Interfacial Desalination to Achieve High‐Performance Evaporation With In Situ Energy Generation

Structure Architecting for Salt‐Rejecting Solar Interfacial Desalination to Achieve High‐Performance Evaporation With In Situ Energy Generation

Photocatalysis for Wastewater Treatment with Special Emphasis on Plastic Degradation

Designing a bioinspired synthetic tree by unidirectional freezing for simultaneous solar steam generation and salt collection

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