Nano-Micro Letters, Volume. 16, Issue 1, 008(2024)

Ionization Engineering of Hydrogels Enables Highly Efficient Salt-Impeded Solar Evaporation and Night-Time Electricity Harvesting

Nan He... Haonan Wang, Haotian Zhang, Bo Jiang, Dawei Tang and Lin Li* |Show fewer author(s)
Author Affiliations
  • School of Energy and Power Engineering, Key Laboratory of Ocean Energy Utilization and Energy Conservation of Ministry of Education, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, People’s Republic of China
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    Interfacial solar evaporation holds immense potential for brine desalination with low carbon footprints and high energy utilization. Hydrogels, as a tunable material platform from the molecular level to the macroscopic scale, have been considered the most promising candidate for solar evaporation. However, the simultaneous achievement of high evaporation efficiency and satisfactory tolerance to salt ions in brine remains a challenging scientific bottleneck, restricting the widespread application. Herein, we report ionization engineering, which endows polymer chains of hydrogels with electronegativity for impeding salt ions and activating water molecules, fundamentally overcoming the hydrogel salt-impeded challenge and dramatically expediting water evaporating in brine. The sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate-modified carbon black is chosen as the solar absorbers. The hydrogel reaches a ground-breaking evaporation rate of 2.9 kg m-2 h-1 in 20 wt% brine with 95.6% efficiency under one sun irradiation, surpassing most of the reported literature. More notably, such a hydrogel-based evaporator enables extracting clean water from oversaturated salt solutions and maintains durability under different high-strength deformation or a 15-day continuous operation. Meantime, on the basis of the cation selectivity induced by the electronegativity, we first propose an all-day system that evaporates during the day and generates salinity-gradient electricity using waste-evaporated brine at night, anticipating pioneer a new opportunity for all-day resource-generating systems in fields of freshwater and electricity.

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    Nan He, Haonan Wang, Haotian Zhang, Bo Jiang, Dawei Tang, Lin Li. Ionization Engineering of Hydrogels Enables Highly Efficient Salt-Impeded Solar Evaporation and Night-Time Electricity Harvesting[J]. Nano-Micro Letters, 2024, 16(1): 008

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    Paper Information

    Category: Research Articles

    Received: Jun. 15, 2023

    Accepted: Sep. 11, 2023

    Published Online: Jan. 23, 2025

    The Author Email: Li Lin (lilinnd@dlut.edu.cn)

    DOI:10.1007/s40820-023-01215-1

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