A facile nanocomposite strategy to fabricate a rGO–MWCNT photothermal layer for efficient water evaporation
By Yuchao Wang, Canzhu Wang, Xiangju Song, Suresh Kumar Megarajan, Heqing Jiang. 2018
251 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Solar-driven water evaporation assisted by photothermal membranes is considered as one of the sustainable and cost-effective strategies for pure water generation and wastewater treatment. Herein, we report a facile but effective approach to improve the photothermal performance by combining 2D reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and 1D multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), which have different nanomorphologies. The photothermal layer can be easily deposited on different substrate materials via simple vacuum assistance. Such a composite photothermal layer shows a rough surface with a controllable nano-structure, which can thus optimize solar light harvesting. On the other hand, the formation of a loose internal porous structure and suitable wettability ensure water transport inside the photothermal layer during evaporation. The surface temperature reaches as high as 78 °C even under one sun irradiation (1 kW m−2), which is 10 °C higher than the result of pure rGO membranes. When loaded on a PVDF substrate, the rGO–MWCNT based membrane is flexible and shows an obvious improvement in the evaporation rate, about 79.0% and 8.9% higher than those of pure rGO and MWCNT membranes, respectively. The solar thermal conversion efficiency can reach up to 80.4% without any extra accessory for thermal management. Based on our results, the nanocomposite strategy is facile and effective for the development of novel photothermal membranes for high-efficiency evaporation, and contributes to the widespread application in the fields of desalination and wastewater treatment.
Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Surfaces, Coatings and Films, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93fbeb167acb960757a8226c90d5267f654585eb
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In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
In Surfaces, Coatings and Films
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Emerging investigator series: the rise of nano-enabled photothermal materials for water evaporation and clean water production by sunlight (2018, background): “36 58 Also reported were other carbon based photothermal materials, such as carbonized mushrooms, 59 microporous coke synthesized from zeolite templates, 34 a 3D printed CNT/GO/nanofibrous cellulose composite with a box structure.”