Robust and Low-Cost Flame-Treated Wood for High-Performance Solar Steam Generation
Top Cited Papers
- 18 April 2017
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
- Vol. 9 (17), 15052-15057
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.7b01992
Abstract
Solar-enabled steam generation has attracted increasing interest in recent years because of its potential applications in power generation, desalination, and wastewater treatment, among others. Recent studies have reported many strategies for promoting the efficiency of steam generation by employing absorbers based on carbon materials or plasmonic metal nanoparticles with well-defined pores. In this work, we report that natural wood can be utilized as an ideal solar absorber after a simple flame treatment. With ultrahigh solar absorbance (∼99%), low thermal conductivity (0.33 W m K), and good hydrophilicity, the flame-treated wood can localize the solar heating at the evaporation surface and enable a solar-thermal efficiency of ∼72% under a solar intensity of 1 kW m, and it thus represents a renewable, scalable, low-cost, and robust material for solar steam applications.Keywords
Funding Information
- Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (HUST: 2015MS004)
- China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2015M570639)
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (51322210, 51606082, 51672097)
- Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
- Director Fund, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics
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