Biomimetic Design of Photothermal/Electrothermal Fabric Composed of Carbon‐Core/Nanorod‐Array‐Shell Fibers for Efficient All‐Weather Seawater Evaporation
Xiaolong Li, Yonghang Chen, Bo Zhu, Mohsen Salimi, Lisha Zhang, Majid Amidpour, Meifang Zhu, Zhigang Chen
Abstract
Abstract Sunlight/electricity‐driven thermal evaporation has been demonstrated as a promising strategy to obtain distilled water from seawater, but their practical applications are still limited by unsatisfactory photoabsorption and serious water‐electrolysis during photothermal/electrothermal evaporation. Inspired by Paradisaeidae's feather and electric kettle, the biomimetic design of photothermal/electrothermal fabrics for realizing all‐weather evaporation is reported. The fabrics are composed of fiber bundles with carbon fiber (CF) as the core and polypyrrole‐decorated TiO 2 nanorod‐array as a shell. Such CF/TiO 2 /PPy fabric exhibits broad‐spectral (280–2500 nm) photoabsorption with an efficiency of 95.5% due to the light‐trapping effect, and it shows an evaporation rate (2.2 kg m −2 h −1 ) under 1 sun. Additionally, CF/TiO 2 /PPy fabric demonstrates good electrothermal performance with suppressed water‐electrolysis owing to the conductivity of CF and shielding effect of the nanorod‐array‐shell, resulting in high evaporation rate of 7.9 kg m −2 h −1 under 3 V. Importantly, by the combined effects of 1 sun and 3 V, CF/TiO 2 /PPy fabric achieves an exciting evaporation rate of 9.1 kg m −2 h −1 , even without solid‐salt accumulation in the long‐term evaporation process (10 h), benefiting from efficient photo/electrothermal conversion and sufficient water‐supplementation from thermosiphon effect. Thus, the present biomimetic design of photothermal/electrothermal fabric supplies a new path to realize efficient all‐weather seawater evaporation.