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Mushroom-Like rGO/PAM Hybrid Cryogels with Efficient Solar-Heating Water Evaporation
journal contribution
posted on 2019-10-17, 16:34 authored by Chuan-Shan Hu, Hui-Juan Li, Jia-Yun Wang, Abdul Haleem, Xi-Chuan Li, Muhammad Siddiq, Wei-Dong HeLacking
clean water has become a matter of urgency and harvesting solar energy
for water evaporation is an efficient solution. Loading photothermal
materials into porous and hydrophilic matrix prominently facilitates
the water evaporation efficiency. In this work, cryopolymerization
was adopted first to fabricate macroporous and hydrophilic matrix–cryogel
of polyacrylamide (PAM) while reduced graphene oxide (rGO) was hybridized
during the fabrication with thermal reduction of graphene oxide (GO).
Inspired by the transpiration of natural mushroom, the solar-heating
device was integrated with the stipe of PAM cryogel, which expedited
the transport of water from the water reservoir to the pileus and
the elimination of heating energy loss, and the pileus composed of
rGO/PAM hybrid cryogel, which enabled the high efficiency of solar
light absorption and solar-heating conversion. Such a mushroom-like
device achieved rapid water vapor generation and high overall efficiency
of solar-heating evaporation under one-sun illumination. As well,
this mushroom-like device exhibited the identical practicability of
solar-heating evaporation for the different water sources such as
the wastewater containing salt, surfactant, or oil, compared with
pure water. Within 10 cycles, those mushroom-like rGO/PAM hybrid cryogels
retained the analogous solar-heating evaporation performance. The
mushroom bioinspiration and cryopolymerization would afford a novel
and convenient route for highly efficient solar-heating water evaporation.