Bioinspired Carbon-Silver Sulfide Scaffold with Synergistic Enhanced Light Capture and Anti-Biofouling Property for Stable Solar Steam Generation

Abstract

Carbon material is a hot topic in solar evaporation. Due to the widely distributed microorganisms in natural water, biofouling has limited the actual application of solar evaporation material. Although carbon material lacks of nutrition for microbe, it is still vulnerable to biofouling because of the efficient pollutant adsorption property. However, current anti-biofouling design focuses on microbial control, neglects its influence on evaporators light absorption, that is usually a trade-off with evaporation efficiency. Herein, a bioinspired aligned carbon-Ag₂S scaffold is introduced with synergistical enhanced light absorption (increased to 98.0% from 97.4%) and anti-biofouling property. The bioinspired aligned carbon-Ag₂S scaffold exhibits a 1.87 kg m⁻² h⁻¹ evaporation rate under one sun, superior to pure carbon scaffold (1.78 kg m⁻² h⁻¹). It also maintains efficient light capture (-97.2%) and evaporation rate (1.73 kg m⁻² h⁻¹) after bacterial interference, avoiding sharp decline in light absorption (reduced to 83.3–87.6%) and evaporation performance (reduced to 1.24–1.28 kg m⁻² h⁻¹) which occurs in carbon scaffold due to biofouling. The carbon-Ag₂S scaffold shows solid advantage in balancing light captures and biofouling control, compared to carbon-ZnO scaffold with conventional anti-biofouling design, which inhibits biofouling sacrificing light absorption (reduced to 89.8%) and evaporation performance (reduced to 1.41 kg m⁻² h⁻¹).