Sustainable upcycling of waste polyethylene terephthalate into hierarchically porous carbon nanosheet for interfacial solar steam and hydroelectricity generation
- Indexed by:Journal paper
- First Author:Qiuxuan Liu
- Correspondence Author:Jiang Gong
- Co-author:Huiyue Wang,Xueying Wen,Guixin Hu,Huajian Liu,Zhi Gong,Sizheng Bi,Qianyu Wei,Ran Niu
- Journal:Sustainable Materials and Technologies
- Included Journals:SCI
- Discipline:Science
- First-Level Discipline:Chemistry
- Document Type:J
- Volume:41
- Page Number:e01022
- Key Words:Sustainable conversion; Hydroelectricity; Interfacial solar-driven evaporation; Waste polyester; Hierarchically porous carbon
- DOI number:10.1016/j.susmat.2024.e01022
- Date of Publication:2024-06-17
- Impact Factor:8.6
- Abstract:Solar-driven interfacial evaporation coupled with hydroelectricity technology is regarded as a hopeful tactic to co-generate freshwater and electricity. However, constructing low-cost evaporators/generators remain a grand challenge. Herein, we report a salt-assisted carbonization method to convert waste polyethylene terephthalate to be hierarchically porous carbon nanosheet (HPCN) and build a flexible HPCN-based evaporator for freshwater and hydroelectricity co-generation. HPCN exhibits a wrinkled structure with the thickness of ca. 3.4 nm. The HPCN-based evaporator displays good hydrophilicity, high sunlight absorption (98%), high solar-to-thermal conversion, reduced water evaporation enthalpy, and low thermal conductivity. It exhibits high evaporation rate (2.65 kg m−2 h−1) and conversion efficiency (98.0%) through 1 kW m−2 irradiation, exceeding many advanced solar evaporators. Importantly, the HPCN evaporator-based hydroelectricity generator realizes high voltage (255 mV) and current (310 nA) with good stability. The combination of large specific surface area with wealthy oxygen-containing groups of HPCN plays important roles in hydroelectricity generation. In outdoor experiment, the freshwater production amount from per meter square achieves 6.32 kg. This work provides a green approach to upcycle waste plastics to be functional carbon materials and offers a new platform to construct advanced evaporators for solar evaporation and hydroelectricity generation.
- Links to published journals:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.susmat.2024.e01022
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