Post date: October 4, 2020
Student: Shenghao Wu
Faculty: Timothy S. Fisher
Sponsor: China Scholarship Council: ZJU-UCLA Joint Doctoral Program
Summary: Water scarcity, driven by constantly increasing economic development and global environmental pollution, has elicited much demand for new, technology-driven solutions. Solar desalination that exploits interfacial evaporation represents a promising solution to the global water scarcity. Real-world feedstocks (e.g., natural seawater and contaminated water) include oil contamination issues, raising a compelling need for desalination systems that offer anti-oil-fouling capability; however, it is still challenging to prepare oil-repellent and meanwhile water-attracting surfaces.
We developed an in-water and simultaneously in-air oleophobic, hydrophilic surface by dispersing functional molecules on vertically oriented graphene nanosheets (VGs) to realize an anti-oil-fouling solar desalination system. As shown in Figure 1, VGs (black triangles) are perpendicularly oriented on a carbon cloth substrate (gray) by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). The VGs are purposely introduced to enhance light absorptance and solid−liquid interfacial heat transfer, as well as to increase the surface roughness to improve the anti-oil-fouling behavior.