Scalable preparation of carbon fabric Janus membrane for water evaporation, photothermal conversion, sewage treatment, and desalination applications and its practical application

Abstract

In this work, a novel, large scalable, multifunctional carbon fabrics/rayon/polyur-ethane (CF/rayon/PU) Janus membrane was designed and successfully developed. The Janus membrane was purposely designed based on premises of: i) mass production, excellent photothermal conversion, and hydrophobicity of CF that is selected to be upper layer. ii) effective water transporting property of rayon that is chosen to be middle layer. iii) insulating property of PU, which is used as bottom layer. These synergic properties can play crucial role for effective water evaporation properties of the Janus membrane. The photothermal conversion, desalination, water evaporation, and sewage treatments performances of the as-synthesized Janus membrane were examined. Besides, the real application of the developed Janus membrane for real sewage water treatment under natural sun light irradiation was also studied. The findings show that the developed CF/rayon/PU Janus membrane has outstanding photothermal conversion, water evaporation (124%), desalination (99.99%) and sewage treatment (100%) properties. The water evaporation property of the Janus membrane is also better than previously reported solar light water evaporators. It also exhibited excellent cyclic stability for that is crucial for practical water evaporation. Moreover, the developed CF/Rayon/PU Janus membrane exhibited superb water evaporation performance and real sewage water treatment under natural sun irradiation in real application. Besides, the preparation method can be used for large-scale application. Therefore, the developed evaporator can play crucial role in addressing clean water scarcity problem in daily life.