Recently, a green process, named "air-water interfacial solar heating", has been employed for seawater desalination to avoid high energy consuming as in the conventional thermal distillation process. In this work, TiO2@MoS2 composite was used as photothermal material for both efficient solar water evaporation and water purification based on this new concept. The TiO2@MoS2 composite was composed of a top layer of our evaporator for high solar absorption and organic contaminants removal, a thermal barrier layer of expandable polyethylene foam for excellent heat insulation, and a water pumping channel of fiber for fast water pump to the top layer. The water evaporation rates of our new evaporator were significantly enhanced, which is much faster than that water evaporation itself. The temperature gradient distributions from the surface to bottom of the water directly demonstrated the advantage of interfacial solar heating for water evaporation. The evaporator was shown to have excellent stability and durability as there was no decrease in water evaporation rate more than 20 cycle of use. In addition, it was demonstrated that model organic pollutants could be well removed by the TiO2@MoS2 composite under the action of adsorption and photocatalysis, resulting in the production of clean condensed water. In addition, some real water samples were collected in our experiment to verify that the water quality of the freshwater could be enhanced by the TiO2@MoS2 composite.

TiO2@MoS2 composite for highly efficient water evaporation and water purification by interfacial solar heating

2019 Fall National Meeting

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