Guaranteeing Complete Salt Rejection by Channeling Saline Water through Fluidic Photothermal Structure toward Synergistic Zero Energy Clean Water Production and In Situ Energy Generation

• Published in: ACS energy letters 2020-11, Vol.5 (11), p.3397-3404
• Main Authors: Zhang, Yaoxin, Xiong, Ting, Suresh, Lakshmi, Qu, Hao, Zhang, Xueping, Zhang, Qian, Yang, Jiachen, Tan, Swee Ching
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2380-8195; 2380-8195
• DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.0c01797

The salt fouling issue, which has become the major bottleneck hindering a sustainable solar desalination process in practice. Herein, a fluidic photothermal structure that is able to completely prevent salt formation for durable steam generation while achieving electricity generation during the one-way fluid transportation is reported. By continuously navigating the one-way saline fluid through solar absorber, salt rejection can be completely guaranteed during intense steam generation. The proposed strategy was demonstrated by a polyaniline (PANi)/cellulose bilayer and realized ultrahigh solar efficiency (92%) under 1 Sun illumination. We further show that electricity is synchronously generated via asymmetric deposition of functional carbon materials on capillary wicks, and voltage >0.2 V is readily derived with good scalability. This one-way fluidic structure exhibits favorable universality to nearly all the other planar solar absorbers and multistage solar stills, which would be of great practical significance to long-term solar desalination in the future.