Energy and water are of fundamental importance for our modern society, and advanced technologies on sustainable energy storage and conversion as well as water resource management are in the focus of intensive research worldwide. Beyond their traditional biological applications, hydrogels are emerging as an appealing materials platform for energy- and water-related applications owing to their attractive and tailorable physiochemical properties. In this review, we highlight the highly tunable synthesis of various hydrogels, involving key synthetic elements such as monomer/polymer building blocks, cross-linkers, and functional additives, and discuss how hydrogels can be employed as precursors and templates for architecting three-dimensional frameworks of electrochemically active materials. We then present an in-depth discussion of the structure-property relationships of hydrogel materials based on fundamental gelation chemistry, ultimately targeting properties such as enhanced ionic/electronic conductivities, mechanical strength, flexibility, stimuli-responsiveness, and desirable swelling behavior. The unique interconnected porous structures of hydrogels enable fast charge/mass transport while offering large surface areas, and the polymer-water interactions can be regulated to achieve desirable water retention, absorption, and evaporation within hydrogels. Such structure-derived properties are also intimately coordinated to realize multifunctionality and stability for different target devices. The plethora of stimulating examples is expounded with a focus on batteries, supercapacitors, electrocatalysts, solar water purification, and atmospheric water harvesting, which showcase the unprecedented technological potential enabled by hydrogels and hydrogel-derived materials. Finally, we study the challenges and potential ways of tackling them to reveal the underlying mechanisms and transform the current development of hydrogel materials into sustainable energy and water technologies.

Hydrogels and Hydrogel-Derived Materials for Energy and Water Sustainability.

The past few years have witnessed a rapid development of solar-driven interfacial evaporation, a promising technology for low-cost water desalination. As of today, solar-to-steam conversion efficiencies close to 100% or even beyond the limit are becoming increasingly achievable in virtue of unique photothermal materials and structures. Herein, the cutting-edge approaches are summarized, and their mechanisms for photothermal structure architecting are uncovered in order to achieve ultrahigh conversion efficiency. Design principles to enhance evaporation performance and currently available salt-rejection strategies for long-term desalination are systematically investigated. The guidelines to utilize every component in solar desalination systems for simultaneous in situ energy generation are also revealed. Finally, opportunities and challenges for future works in this field are also discussed and concluded.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/advs.201903478

Structure Architecting for Salt-Rejecting Solar Interfacial Desalination to Achieve High-Performance Evaporation With In Situ Energy Generation.

Salt Mitigation Strategies of Solar-Driven Interfacial Desalination

Solar desalination holds significant promise for the water-energy nexus. Recent advances in passive solar desalination using thermal localization show great potential for high-efficiency freshwater production, which is particularly beneficial for areas without well-established water and energy infrastructure. However, there is a significant knowledge gap between laboratory scale innovation and commercial adoption. In this review, we discuss two critical factors – water production and reliability – which, if addressed systematically, could enable high-performance thermally-localized solar desalination systems. We show that optimizing heat and mass transfer of the entire device and recycling the latent heat of condensation are important to enhance total water production. Meanwhile, we discuss the potential of novel system architectures and fluid flow engineering to enable anti-fouling and robust desalination devices. In addition, we present techno-economic analysis that highlights the balance between water production, reliability, and cost. A criterion for economic feasibility is provided by comparing the price of desalinated water with commercially available bottle and tap water, which provides a roadmap for future development of solar desalination technologies.

/pdf/passive-high-efficiency-thermally-localized-solar-471y80yutn.pdf

Passive, high-efficiency thermally-localized solar desalination

Solar-Driven Interfacial Evaporation and Self-Powered Water Wave Detection Based on an All-Cellulose Monolithic Design

DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201900552 the United State and the power density of natural evaporation is comparable to the current wind and solar technologies.[5] While the solar-thermal energy conversion efficiency was intrinsically limited by the performance of the absorber, which already reached ≈94%,[6,7] the overall performance of the solar-thermal desalination system would be compromised without sufficient water supply and the ability to resist salt contamination. To solve this problem, several studies explored the capillary pumping effect as a passive liquid supply mechanism where liquid was driven by the capillary pressure in the micropores,[8,9] microgrooves,[10] fibrous meshes,[11,12] and carbon foam,[13,14] etc. Although the capillary pumping is able to provide high liquid flux, there are two challenges associated with the capillary-driven desalination. First, there is an inherent tradeoff between capillary pumping pressure and flow resistance, as the former scales inversely with the pore size (i.e., 1/d) and the latter as d2 for the same flow rate. As a result, the pore diameter cannot be too small in order to ensure a certain flow rate. This tradeoff is even more prominent in solar desalination, as the thickness of the capillary pumping layer has to be large enough to minimize the dissipation of solar heat to the underlying seawater, a major contributor to the total heat loss,[11] which in term limits the overall flow rate due to the flow resistance. Typically, a thick thermally insulating layer was used to separate the absorber and seawater.[15,16] We calculated the maximum achievable flow rate for various foam thickness and thermal conductivity in a capillary pumping layer when the heat loss to the bulk seawater is less than 10% of the incident solar energy under the 1 and 3-sun condition (Sections S2.1 and S3, Supporting Information). These optimal flow rates are far lower than the theoretical flow rate of solar evaporation due to the solar heat if the thick foam is used. Second, the capillary pumping pressure is inversely proportional to pore size, so small pores, often at micron scale, are usually used for liquid pumping. The fine porous structures as liquid pathways were inherently prone to the clogging by contamination[6,17,18] during the evaporation, which undermined the liquid flux and stability in the long term. The salt sediment on the top of the absorber would reduce the solar absorbance[17] as well as the effective area for evaporation. Therefore, the absorber needed to be taken out for cleaning periodically,[6] which may impact the durability of the absorber and stability Efficient mass transport and selective salt rejection are highly desirable for solar or thermally driven seawater desalination, but its realization is challenging. Here a new liquid supply mechanism is proposed, i.e., ionic pumping effect, using a polyelectrolyte hydrogel foam (PHF), demonstrated with poly(sodium acrylate) [P(SA)] embedded in a microporous carbon foam (CF). The PHF simultaneously possesses high osmotic pressure for liquid transport and a strong salt-rejection effect. The PHF is able to sustain high flux of ≈24 L per m2 per hour (LMH), comparable to the evaporative flux under 15 suns, and a salt rejection ratio over 80%. Compared to the porous carbon foam without the polyelectrolyte hydrogel, i.e., with only the capillary pumping effect, the PHF yields a 42.4% higher evaporative flux, at ≈1.6 LMH with DI water and ≈1.3 LMH with simulated seawater under one-sun condition due to the more efficient ionic liquid pumping. More importantly, thanks to the strong salt-rejection effect, the PHF shows a continuous and stable solar-driven desalination flux of ≈1.3 LMH under one-sun over 72 h, which has not been achieved before. The successful demonstration of both efficient ionic pumping and strong salt rejection effects makes the PHF an attractive platform for sustainable solar-driven desalination.

Osmotic Pumping and Salt Rejection by Polyelectrolyte Hydrogel for Continuous Solar Desalination

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Osmotic Pumping and Salt Rejection by Polyelectrolyte Hydrogel for Continuous Solar Desalination