Emerging solar desalination by interfacial evaporation shows great potential in response to global water scarcity because of its high solar-to-vapor efficiency, low environmental impact, and off-grid capability. However, solute accumulation at the heating interface has severely impacted the performance and long-term stability of current solar evaporation systems. Here, a self-regenerating solar evaporator featuring excellent antifouling properties using a rationally designed artificial channel-array in a natural wood substrate is reported. Upon solar evaporation, salt concentration gradients are formed between the millimeter-sized drilled channels (with a low salt concentration) and the microsized natural wood channels (with a high salt concentration) due to their different hydraulic conductivities. The concentration gradients allow spontaneous interchannel salt exchange through the 1-2 µm pits, leading to the dilution of salt in the microsized wood channels. The drilled channels with high hydraulic conductivities thus function as salt-rejection pathways, which can rapidly exchange the salt with the bulk solution, enabling the real-time self-regeneration of the evaporator. Compared to other salt-rejection designs, the solar evaporator exhibits the highest efficiency (≈75%) in a highly concentrated salt solution (20 wt% NaCl) under 1 sun irradiation, as well as long-term stability (over 100 h of continuous operation).

A High-Performance Self-Regenerating Solar Evaporator for Continuous Water Desalination

Since solar energy is the ultimate energy resource and a significant amount of global energy utilization goes through heat, there have been persistent efforts for centuries to develop devices and systems for solar-thermal conversion. Most recently, interfacial solar vapor generation, as an emerging concept of solar-thermal conversion, has gained significant attention for its great potentials in various fields such as desalination, sterilization, catalysis, etc. With the advances of rationally designed materials and structures and photon and thermal management at the nanoscale, interfacial solar vapor generation has demonstrated both thermodynamic and kinetical advantages over conventional strategies. In this review, we aim to illustrate the definition, mechanism and figures of merit of interfacial solar vapor generation, and to summarize the development progress of relevant materials and applications, as well as to provide a prospective view of the future.

The revival of thermal utilization from the Sun: interfacial solar vapor generation

Salt Mitigation Strategies of Solar-Driven Interfacial Desalination

Water shortage is one of the most concerning global challenges in the 21st century. Solar-inspired vaporization employing photothermal nanomaterials is considered to be a feasible and green technology for addressing the water challenge by virtue of abundant and clean solar energy. 2D nanomaterials aroused considerable attention in photothermal evaporation-induced water production owing to their large absorption surface, strong absorption in broadband solar spectrum, and efficient photothermal conversion. Herein, the recent progress of 2D nanomaterials-based photothermal evaporation, mainly including emerging Xenes (phosphorene, antimonene, tellurene, and borophene) and binary-enes (MXenes and transition metal dichalcogenides), is reviewed. Then, the optimization strategies for higher evaporation performance are summarized in terms of modulation of the intrinsic photothermal performance of 2D nanomaterials and design of the complete evaporation system. Finally, the challenges and prospective of various kinds of 2D photothermal nanomaterials are discussed in terms of the photothermal performance, stability, environmental influence, and cost. One important principle is that solutions for water challenges should not introduce new environmental and social problems. This Review aims to highlight the role of 2D photothermal nanomaterials in solving water challenges and provides a viable scheme toward the practical use in photothermal materials selection, design, and evaporation systems building.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/advs.201902236

The Rise of 2D Photothermal Materials beyond Graphene for Clean Water Production

To alleviate the scarcity of clean water, solar steam generation, which utilizes the green and abundant resources of Earth, has attracted considerable attention and been recognized as a sustainable technology to purify seawater and wastewater. Within the past five to seven years, building on remarkable advances in the synthesis of nanoscale photothermal materials, significant progress has been made in the design and fabrication of solar evaporators. Here, we comprehensively review the materials and structures of the three key components of solar evaporators: solar absorbers, substrates (i.e., support layers), and water collectors towards efficient harvesting of sunlight, thermal management, water transportation, interfacial evaporation, and collection. In particular, we discuss the design principles of water collectors for solar-driven evaporation, which are in the early stages of development at present. Furthermore, bio-inspired water collectors provide exciting opportunities for the design and realization of efficient water harvesting from solar steam. Finally, we introduce photothermal-enhanced membrane distillation (PMD), a promising alternative technique involving solar-driven interfacial evaporation for producing clean water. PMD combines solar energy and membrane distillation, which facilitates efficient water purification and collection. In this review, we discuss the design guidelines and recent development of this photothermal-enhanced water purification. This review provides useful insights into the material choice and structure optimization to realize enhanced solar evaporators towards freshwater generation.

Advances in solar evaporator materials for freshwater generation

Synthesis and Stabilization of Cubic Gauche Polynitrogen under Radio-Frequency Plasma

Efficient solar vapor/steam generation is important for various applications ranging from power generation, cooling, desalination systems to compact and portable devices like drinking water purification and sterilization units However, conventional solar steam generation techniques usually rely on costly and cumbersome optical concentration systems and have relatively low efficiency due to bulk heating of the entire liquid volume Recently, by incorporating novel light harvesting receivers, a new class of solar steam generation systems has emerged with high vapor generation efficiency They are categorized in two research streams: volumetric and floating solar receivers In this paper, we review the basic principles of these solar receivers, the mechanism involving from light absorption to the vapor generation, and the associated challenges We also highlight the two routes to produce high temperature steam using optical and thermal concentration Finally, we propose a scalable approach to efficiently harvest solar energy using a semi-spectrally selective absorber with near-perfect visible light absorption and low thermal emittance Our proposed approach represents a new development in thermally concentrated solar distillation systems, which is also cost-effective and easy to fabricate for rapid industrial deployment

Novel Receiver-Enhanced Solar Vapor Generation: Review and Perspectives

Synthesis of polymeric nitrogen with non-thermal radio frequency plasma

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Synthesis and Stabilization of Cubic Gauche Polynitrogen under Radio-Frequency Plasma

Novel Receiver-Enhanced Solar Vapor Generation: Review and Perspectives

Synthesis of polymeric nitrogen with non-thermal radio frequency plasma