A simple and universal strategy to deposit Ag/polypyrrole on various substrates for enhanced interfacial solar evaporation and antibacterial activity

By Yingli Xu, Jiaxiang Ma, Yu Han, Hongbo Xu, Yu Wang, Dianpeng Qi, Wei Wang. 2020

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Solar-driven distillation is now considered as a rising technology for the supply of fresh water in the rare areas. As the crucial part of solar distillation, photothermal materials have been flourished investigated. Herein, we report a universal and facile method to construct a photothermal layer on various substrates to enhance the interfacial water evaporation via polypyrrole (PPy) polymerization and silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) deposition. The photothermal Ag/PPy layer was firmly coated on six different substrates with an average solar absorption of 95.4% and Ag loading of 94.3 mg/L. One of the optimized resultant membranes (substrate is cellulose fibers) presents the ultrahigh solar evaporation rate of 1.55 kg m−2h−1 and a corresponding light-to-vapor efficiency of 92.6% with a silver loading of 74 μg cm−2. Bacterial diffusion inhibition zone experiments revealed clear antibacterial effects of the Ag/PPy membrane on bacteria. Furthermore, the Ag NPs deposited membrane had a rechargeability for multiple times upon their depletion, indicating sustainable anti-bacteria potential. Hence, our facial fabricated photothermal Ag/PPy layer can apply to substrates with different types for enhanced photothermal and anti-biocorrosion capacity, and may pave a new way to the long-term practical sustainable technique for the clean water production application.

Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/281fed8fdeeac6620d04d519e7b6fb9425dbd018