Issue 4, 2021

Bioinspired structural and functional designs towards interfacial solar steam generation for clean water production

Abstract

Fresh water shortage is rapidly emerging as a global crisis, threatening the future development of human society. Extracting fresh water from seawater, wastewater and even atmospheric water efficiently has become a critical challenge to the research community. In recent years, solar-driven evaporation has aroused enormous research interest owing to its low-cost and sustainable potential. As a new bioinspired approach for clean water production, interfacial solar steam generation makes direct use of solar energy to generate water steam through latent heat. Fresh water can then be collected by condensing the water steam on a colder substrate. To date, quite a number of photothermal materials and rational structure designs for efficient solar evaporators have been reported. In this review, the design principles and evaporation systems for interfacial solar evaporation are summarized. Multifunctional designs of evaporators, salt-rejection, and antifouling capability are also discussed, which is of great significance to long-term and efficient solar water collection. In the last section, some prospects for the development of solar evaporators are proposed.

Graphical abstract: Bioinspired structural and functional designs towards interfacial solar steam generation for clean water production

Article information

Article type
Review Article
Submitted
30 9 2020
Accepted
15 11 2020
First published
18 11 2020

Mater. Chem. Front., 2021,5, 1510-1524

Bioinspired structural and functional designs towards interfacial solar steam generation for clean water production

X. Dong, S. Gao, S. Li, T. Zhu, J. Huang, Z. Chen and Y. Lai, Mater. Chem. Front., 2021, 5, 1510 DOI: 10.1039/D0QM00766H

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements