Vascular Bundle for Exceptional Water Confinement, Transport, and Evaporation.

ABSTRACT: Nature, through billions of years of evolution, has constructed extremely efficient biosystems for transporting, confining, and vaporizing water. Mankind's ability to master water, however, is far from impeccable, and a sustainable supply of clean fresh water remains a global challenge. Here, we learn from Nature and prepare papyrus carbon (PC) from Egyptian papyrus paper as a sustainable solar desalination material. By taking advantage of the capillary pores from vascular bundles that are inherently built for transporting water in plants, PC achieves an evaporation rate of 4.1 kg m^-2 h^-1 in a passive single-stage device. Raman spectroscopy and thermal calorimetry show that the capillary pores pose a confinement effect to generate loosely hydrogen-bonded intermediate

SUBMITTER: Nouh ESA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10848287 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature