Carbonized daikon for high efficient solar steam generation

By Mengmeng Zhu, Jialiang Yu, Cunlin Ma, Canying Zhang, Daxiong Wu, Haitao Zhu. Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, 2019

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Steam generation by efficient utilization of solar energy is a promising strategy in seawater desalination and industrial wastewater treatment. Daikon, a cheap and scaled available crop, was chosen as raw material which was subjected to a carbonization process. The carbonized daikon possesses highly developed honeycomb cellular structure providing numerous interconnected channels. The close-packed pores act as photon traps leading to enhanced solar absorption of more than 95.5% in the visible region and more than 93.5% in the near infrared region. The excellent hydrophilic nature and the interconnected channels of the carbonized daikon provide strong capillary force for the quick transport of water. As a result, under one-sun irradiation, the carbonized daikon delivers a water evaporation rate of 1.57 kg m−2 h−1 and a solar steam efficiency of 85.9%. The carbonized daikon also shows great performance toward water evaporation from seawater and contaminated water, realizing the separation of water from pollutants and indicating its application versatility.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33ee2b44b6d6c6982f258ebb8fe03161c09a6f0c