title: Robust and Low-Cost Flame-Treated Wood for High-Performance Solar Steam Generation.
abstract: 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-1K-1), 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-2, and it thus represents a renewable, scalable, low-cost, and robust material for solar steam applications.
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Guobin
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Qian
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Peihua
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Jia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Tianpeng
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Jiangjiang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Duan
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Bei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Qi
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology , Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4799-8165
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhou
keywords: carbon nanoparticle; flame treatment; photothermal conversion; solar steam generation; wood