Evaporation-Driven Fabric for Synergistic Water-Electricity-Lithium Co-Production.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40899633.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1002/adma.202506956.
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Abstract
Water evaporation constitutes a ubiquitous physical phenomenon. This natural process enables efficient energy and resource harvesting through water interacting with materials with tailored structural, chemical, and thermal properties. Here, this work designs an evaporation-driven fabric (e-fabric) that enables the utilization of water-electricity-lithium from brine through three optimized functional layers. Interfacial charge asymmetry between the carbon black (CB) photothermal layer and Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> thermal insulation layer drives directional ion transport, generating sustained hydrovoltaic output with ≈7.7 µA cm<sup>-2</sup> current density. Under 1 kW m<sup>-2</sup> sun irradiation, e-fabric demonstrates 1.42 kg m<sup>-2</sup> h<sup>-1</sup> evaporation rate in brine while the Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> layer reduces thermal dissipation. The middle protonated lithium titanate (HTO) adsorption layer selectively captures Li<sup>+</sup> which achieves an adsorption capacity of 40.87 mg m<sup>-2</sup> during a 2-h adsorption cycle while maintaining 93.2% recovery efficiency over 8 cycles. The decoupled operation of the adsorption process from the evaporation power generation system effectively prevents ion accumulation from affecting performance. This work can provide an approach for evaporation-driven water-electricity-lithium co-production systems.