Solar-enabled seawater evaporation has been considered to be an attractive, renewable and environmentally friendly way for desalination, alleviating the long-standing problem of freshwater scarcity without the consumption of fossil fuels. Till now, tremendous efforts have been devoted on the fabrication of photothermal membranes and floating them on seawater, generating water vapor under solar irradiation. This floating model suffers from three problems, including unavoidable heat loss, single-face evaporation (only top surface) and solid-salt separation. To solve these problems, we have fabricated polyaniline-cotton photothermal fabric and come up a hanging model that lifts the photothermal fabric away from seawater with only two fabric edges immersed in seawater. In the hanging model, top and bottom surfaces of the fabric are surrounded by air. Thus, the fabric can evaporate seawater on its two surfaces, effectively overcoming the limitations associated with the floating model. Meanwhile, the coverage of air makes the heat dissipation is only 16.8% of that from floating fabric, due to the extremely low conductivity (0.023 W m<sup>-1</sup> K<sup>-1</sup>) of air. More importantly, the hanging fabric is arc-shaped, with its two edges higher than the center. Seawater is absorbed by the fabric from two sides to the center. With the progress of solar-driven seawater evaporation, the high-salinity brine is gathered at the lowest center of hanging fabric and finally dropped down for collection. Dropping brine takes away the salt in fabric, and thus the solid salt separation can be completely avoided. Additionally, the brine is also meaningful for other industry applications, such as sea-salt preparation or the chlor-alkali industry.

Solar seawater evaporation based on hanging polyaniline-cotton photothermal fabrics

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.