Salt‐Rejection Solar Absorbers Based on Porous Ionic Polymers Nanowires for Desalination

Abstract

The construction of photothermal materials with ideal salt tolerance has been a major subject for efficient solar desalination. Herein, a novel photothermal material based on porous ionic polymers (PIPs) nanowires is synthesized by Sonogashira‐Hagihara cross‐coupling reaction using ionic salt and alkynylbenzene as building blocks. The PIPs nanowires monolith shows abundant porosity with low density, leading a superior thermal insulation. The intrinsic superhydrophilicity of PIPs nanowires endows it with desired water transportation ability. By facile spraying Chinese carbon‐ink on the PIPs nanowires monolith, its light absorption can be enhanced to be 90%. Based on these merits, the PIPs nanowires based photothermal materials show high solar energy conversion efficiency (81% under 1 sun irradiation). More interestingly, its inherently ionic framework can result in an ion–ion interaction between the external ions in water and ionic groups in PIPs framework, thus leading to excellent desalination ability by combing its unique superhydrophilicity, for example, no salt accumulation is observed after 6 h duration at 1 sun irradiation. Compared with the existing salt‐resistant photothermal materials, the method takes the advantage of the intrinsically ionic feature of PIPs without using any artificial process, thus may open a new way for design and fabrication of high‐performance salt‐rejection photothermal materials.

Facile Preparation of Cu2S/Cu Mesh For High‐performance Solar Water Evaporation

“…The hydrophilicity of the samples is shown in Figure 2c and Figure 2d, the contact angle of the pretreated Cu mesh is 82.5° while that of the Cu 2 S/Cu is 0°, indicating that Cu 2 S/Cu has excellent hydrophilicity. Good hydrophilicity is also beneficial to improve the desalination performance of the sample [44] …”

Recent Progress on the Solar‐Driven Interfacial Evaporation Based on Natural Products and Synthetic Polymers

“…Under 5 kW m −2 simulated light conditions, the solar‐steam conversion efficiency of the plasma‐treated double‐porous hydrophilic black film reaches 72.0%, and 18 g purified water can be desalted from 160 g seawater in 5 h under natural sunlight. Duan and coworkers [ 184 ] investigated the possibility of enhanced photothermal effects induced by photoinduced electron transfer (PET) of PPF‐3, which is composed of tetra‐(4‐carboxylphenyl) porphyrin (TCPP) and Co 2+ adhesion on polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane; the results show that the SSG rate is PPF‐3 (1.99 kg m −2 h −1 ) > Co‐TCPP (1.72 kg m −2 h −1 ) > TCPP (0.47 kg m −2 h −1 ), suggesting that the introduction of organic chromophore as the bridging ligand can greatly improve the photothermal conversion efficiency of the materials. This work is based on metal organic frameworks (MOFs), which open up a new way for MOFs as cost‐efficient and eligible PMs.…”

Modified Hollow Glass Microspheres/Reduced Graphene Oxide Composite Aerogels with Low Thermal Conductivity for Highly Efficient Solar Steam Generation

“…In order to achieve excellent evaporation performance and realize the practical application of SSG for water purification or desalination, as the key component of an SSG system, photothermal materials should have the properties including excellent absorption of sunlight, a porous and hydrophilic structure for fast water transportation, good thermal insulation to minimize heat loss, etc. − Following these complementary design principles, so far, a wide variety of photothermal materials have been developed, including metallic nanoparticles, polymer-based materials, , biomass-based materials, − and hydrogels. − Among these different types of developed photothermal materials, aerogels have a coherent open three-dimensional porous structure with a high specific surface area, low thermal conductivity, and low density. They are the best choice for photothermal materials, and so far, many aerogel-based photothermal materials have been created. , For instance, the conjugated microporous polymer nanotube aerogels have been reported by our group; they can achieve high energy conversion efficiency (86.8%) under 1 sun illumination.…”