Plant leaves inspired sunlight-driven purifier for high-efficiency clean water production.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30944322.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-09535-w and PMC identifier 6447597.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Natural vascular plants leaves rely on differences in osmotic pressure, transpiration and guttation to produce tons of clean water, powered by sunlight. Inspired by this, we report a sunlight-driven purifier for high-efficiency water purification and production. This sunlight-driven purifier is characterized by a negative temperature response poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) hydrogel (PN) anchored onto a superhydrophilic melamine foam skeleton, and a layer of PNIPAm modified graphene (PG) filter membrane coated outside. Molecular dynamics simulation and experimental results show that the superhydrophilicity of the relatively rigid melamine skeleton significantly accelerates the swelling/deswelling rate of the PNPG-F purifier. Under one sun, this rational engineered structure offers a collection of 4.2 kg m<sup>-2</sup> h<sup>-1</sup> and an ionic rejection of > 99% for a single PNPG-F from brine feed via the cooperation of transpiration and guttation. We envision that such a high-efficiency sunlight driven system could have great potential applications in diverse water treatments.