Recyclable CNT-coupled cotton fabrics for low-cost and efficient desalination of seawater under sunlight

By Huizhi Kou, Zixiao Liu, Bo Zhu, Daniel K. Macharia, Sharjeel Ahmed, Binhe Wu, Meifang Zhu, Xiaogang Liu, Zhigang Chen. Desalination, 2019

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Photothermal membranes have shown tremendous potential for solar-driven seawater desalination, but their practical applications are hindered by the relatively high cost and solid salt separation. To overcome these limitations, we have developed low-cost and washable photothermal fabrics by dyeing traditional cotton fabrics with carbon nanotube (CNT)-based ink. CNT dyed cotton (cotton-CNT) fabrics exhibit strong optical absorption in 250–2500 nm with a total solar absorption efficiency of 95.7%. Using a polystyrene (PS) foam as the thermal insulator, cotton-CNT fabrics exhibit a high seawater evaporation rate of 1.59 Kg m−2 h−1 under simulated sunlight (1.0 KW m−2). More importantly, the fabric can be cleaned and recycled by removing the salts formed after evaporation, through a simple hand-washing process. These cotton-CNT fabrics may provide a new platform for low-cost, high-efficient and large-area seawater desalination under sunlight irradiation.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba86343936b709f1844304c04701689fea6065ee