1 research outputs found
Robust and Low-Cost Flame-Treated Wood for High-Performance Solar Steam Generation
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<sup>–1</sup> K<sup>–1</sup>), 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<sup>–2</sup>, and it thus represents a renewable, scalable, low-cost, and robust
material for solar steam applications