Mushroom-based high-efficiency solar evaporator for water harvesting

Abstract

Solar-driven interfacial evaporation represents an innovative and highly promising strategy to address global freshwater scarcity and enhance water purification technologies. The distinctive structure of natural mushrooms, comprising a pileus and stipe, offers a feasible pathway for designing efficient and low-cost solar evaporators. In this work, natural mushrooms were employed as solar evaporators to evaluate their performance in evaporating seawater and sewage. Under 3.9 suns illumination, evaporation rates of 4.89, 4.57, and 3.73 kg⋅m⁻²⋅h⁻¹ were achieved for sewage, deionized water, and seawater, respectively. Under natural sunlight conditions (0.5 sun), the mushroom evaporator attained rates of 2.62 and 2.13 kg⋅m⁻²⋅h⁻¹ for sewage and seawater, respectively. The mushroom-based evaporator demonstrates not only exceptional photothermal conversion performance but also remarkable cycling stability and durability.

Keywords

Solar-driven interfacial evaporation / Mushroom / High efficiency / Sewage / Seawater

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Hongjun Fu: Writing – original draft, Formal analysis, Data curation. Enhui Ma: Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Xinyang He: Methodology, Investigation. Chunyi Li: Investigation. Jiahui Zhu: Methodology. Qi Feng: Formal analysis. Xinyi Liao: Investigation. Wenxin Liu: Investigation. Xiaodan Huang: Project administration. Rongtai Yu: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Supervision, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52560008).

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