Bifunctional Fabric with Photothermal Effect and Photocatalysis for Highly Efficient Clean Water Generation

By Dandan Hao, Yudi Yang, Bi Xu, Z. Cai. ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 2018

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Fresh water scarcity has become a global challenge owing to the limited fresh water resource and the increasing water pollution. Solar-driven water evaporation with the interfacial heat localization is a promising technology to mitigate the fresh water scarcity. Here, we propose a bifunctional cotton fabric with both photothermal and photocatalytic properties by in situ polymerization of pyrrole (Py) on the cotton and subsequent deposition of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles. The morphology of the polypyrrole (PPy) can be adjusted, and fibrous PPy with a high hydrophilicity and a higher surface area was obtained on the cotton fibers in the presence of polydopamine (PDA). The TiO2–PDA/PPy/cotton showed a solar evaporation rate of 1.55 kg m–2 h–1 under 1 sun illumination, which is higher than that for most previously reported evaporation systems. Besides the efficient solar vapor generation, the TiO2–PDA/PPy/cotton also presented an excellent photocatalysis with a ∼96% degradation of methyl orange (MO)...

Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d7c412c3bd76a1fc209926910c80804f7a157f9