A Facile and General Strategy to Deposit Polypyrrole on Various Substrates for Efficient Solar-Driven Evaporation

Abstract

Solar-driven evaporation for clean water production is currently considered to be one of the most effective and sustainable strategies to alleviate water shortages because of the sustainability, eco-friendliness, and inexhaustibility of solar energy. Plenty of effort has been paid to developing easy-to-follow methods to fabricate the high-performance photothermal materials for efficient water evaporation. In this manuscript, a facile and general strategy named chemical vapor deposition polymerization (CVDP) to deposit dark PPy coating layer onto various substrates, which acts as a light absorber to efficiently harvest and convert light to heat for solar-driven interfacial water evaporation, is reported. The obtained PPy-coated membranes can achieve an outstanding light absorption and show a high stagnation temperature up to 82.3 °C under 1 sun illumination (1 kW m−2). Furthermore, the water evaporation can be accelerated to 1.41 kg m−2 h−1, corresponding to 81.9% on solar conversion efficiency which is comparable to the results of the state-of-the-art photothermal membranes. Due to the moderate reaction conditions, the PPy coating layer can also be deposited onto different porous substrates to meet different water environments. Such novel and effective CVDP strategy for high-performance photothermal membrane fabrication contributes to the widespread applications in sustainable clean water production.