Flexible and Robust Polyaniline Composites for Highly Efficient and Durable Solar Desalination

Abstract

The efficient conversion of solar energy into heat for steam generation has been regarded as a promising strategy toward energy harvesting and water desalination. While many efforts have been devoted to metal- and carbon-based solar thermal systems, concern has arisen that the development of high-performance solar steam devices is still largely limited by the high cost, inflexibility, redundant fabrication process, and low photothermal efficiency. In this work, we report the direct fabrication of flexible and robust polymeric composites for highly efficient solar steam generation simply based on two kinds of inexpensive and popularly used polymers, polyaniline (PANI) and hydrophilic polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). The resulting PANI@PVDF composite devices demonstrate stretchable, durable, and tunable photothermal energy conversion features, which could achieve the excellent evaporation rate of 1.41 kg m–2 h–1 with a high steam generation efficiency of 85.0% under 1 sun illumination. The PANI@PVDF devices also exhibit superb durable evaporation performance over 40 cycles, with a high long-term desalination effect for seawater. This work may offer the opportunity for addressing the current material design challenges that typically limit the practical fabrication of inexpensive, flexible, and robust composites toward solar steam generation and seawater desalination.