Contribution to Emerging Invesigator Series by Environmental Science: Nano (Blog Interview)
The Rise of Nano-Enabled
Photothermal Materials for Water Evaporation and Clean Water Production by Sunlight
Abstract
Solar driven
water evaporation and distillation is an ancient technology, but has been rejuvenated
by nano-enabled photothermal materials in the past 4 years. The nano-enabled state-of-the-art
photothermal materials are able to harvest full solar spectrum and convert it
to heat with extremely high efficiency. Moreover, photothermal structures with heat loss management have evolved in
parallel. These together have led to the steadily and significantly improved energy
efficiency of the solar evaporation and distillation in the past 4 years. Some
unprecedented clean water production rates have been reported in small-scale and
fully solar-driven devices. This frontier presents a timely and systematic review of the
impressive developments on photothermal
nanomaterial discovery, selection, optimization, and photothermal structural
designs along with their applications especially in clean water production. The
current challenges and future perspectives are provided. This article helps
inspire more research efforts from environmental nano communities to push
forward practical solar-driven clean water production.
Keywords: Sunlight, photothermal materials, water evaporation, distillation, interfacial heating
The [PDF] is here
