Issue 17, 2021

A biomass-derived, all-day-round solar evaporation platform for harvesting clean water from microplastic pollution

Abstract

Solar-driven evaporation is highly promising for sustainable freshwater production without high energy-consumption. Till now, it has still been challenging to achieve both high performance and cost-effectiveness within one evaporator. In addition, the rarely reported strategy overcomes the obstacles of emerging microplastic-pollution in water sources and poor all-day-round evaporation. Herein, a low-cost, high-efficiency, biomass-derived three-dimensional (3D) graphene/cotton sponge with gradient vertical microchannels was readily constructed by simply stretching cotton. It served as a versatile photothermal platform with a high evaporation rate (2.49 kg m−2 h−1, normalized to both the top and side surfaces) and could withstand a large external stress of up to 8750-times its weight. Moreover, in the first attempt to efficiently evaporate water (90.6%) from a microplastic-polluted source, nearly 100% of the polyethylene (PE) microfibers were removed from evaporated water by 3D MoS2/graphene/cotton via reactive oxygen species attack and multi-level interception. New in situ FTIR microscopy technology was employed to accurately monitor the degradation mechanism of the PE microplastics. The PE degradation efficiency was as high as 19% in oxygen-enriched water, predominantly contributed by reactive O2˙, and could be easily enhanced to 32% with the aid of additional reactive species (e.g., ˙HOO and H2O2) in 1 h. Besides, under the guidance of finite element analysis (FEA), a phase-change polyethylene glycol (PEG) layer was functionalized outside the graphene/cotton. Notably, it possessed a remarkably high all-day-round evaporation rate (1.63 kg per m2 per h per day, 1.42-times that achieved by a traditional evaporator without phase-change function) by utilizing thermal energy in the dark. This work gives promising alternative strategies for low-cost clean-water harvesting from microplastic-pollution and sustainable evaporation even under dark conditions.

Graphical abstract: A biomass-derived, all-day-round solar evaporation platform for harvesting clean water from microplastic pollution

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
09 Mar 2021
Accepted
14 Apr 2021
First published
15 Apr 2021

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2021,9, 11013-11024

A biomass-derived, all-day-round solar evaporation platform for harvesting clean water from microplastic pollution

X. Meng, X. Peng, J. Xue, Y. Wei, Y. Sun and Y. Dai, J. Mater. Chem. A, 2021, 9, 11013 DOI: 10.1039/D1TA02004H

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