Bioinspired cellulose membrane with hierarchically porous structure for highly efficient solar steam generation

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Bioinspired cellulose membrane with hierarchically porous structure for highly efficient solar steam generation Linfeng Wang . Han Wang . Changjun Liu . Yuan Xu . Sitian Ma . Yan Zhuang . Qian Zhang . Hongjun Yang . Weilin Xu

Received: 28 April 2020 / Accepted: 17 July 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract In order to imitate wood truly in structure and content, a viscose solution was used to prepare a cellulose membrane with the hierarchically porous structure of wood by two-step process of ice-templating and low-temperature phase inversion for a solar steam device. The prepared cellulose membrane with microchannels observed by microscopy, which resembled those of wood, showed excellent wicking and water flux characteristics. The physical properties of cellulose membranes, including mechanical and

Linfeng Wang and Han Wang have contributed equally to this work.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-020-03359-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. L. Wang  C. Liu  S. Ma  H. Yang (&) College of Materials Science and Engineering, Wuhan Textile University, No.1 Yangguang Road, Wuhan 430200, Hubei Province, China e-mail: [email protected] H. Wang  Y. Xu  Q. Zhang  H. Yang  W. Xu (&) Key Laboratory of Green Processing and Functional New Textile Materials of Ministry of Education, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan 430200, China e-mail: [email protected] Y. Zhuang College of Textile Science and Engineering, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan 430200, China

thermal stability, allow their application in many fields. In evaluating of solar steam performance, the water evaporation rate of 1.56 kg m-2 h-1 from a graphene-coated cellulose membrane at the light density of 1 kW m-2 exceeded that of a cellulose membrane with pure water. The water evaporation rate of the cellulose membrane was higher than that of a wood-derived solar steam device. The conversion efficiency was increased from 40.72 to 95.57% with modification of the prepared cellulose membrane using graphene. The collected data showed that the cellulose membrane with a hierarchically porous structure was a promising alternative to wood-based solar steam devices, which have the limitations in the reproducibility of structure and composition. Keywords Wood  Hierarchically porous structure  Solar steam conversion  Cellulose  Ice-template

Introduction The hierarchically porous structure found in wood provides pathways for transporting water, ions, and nutrients associated with photosynthesis; this structure has been used in many fields, including environmental science, energy, and biomedicine (Chen and Hu 2018; Huang et al. 2019; Jiang et al. 2018; Song et al. 2017; Zhu et al. 2016a). In order to increase the applicability

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of wood with vertical channels, many approaches have been proposed to improve the mechanical properties and add functionality for more widespread use