Super Water-Extracting Gels for Solar-Powered Volatile Organic Compounds Management in the Hydrological Cycle

Panpan Zhang, Fei Zhao, Wen Shi, Hengyi Lu*, Xingyi Zhou, Youhong Guo, Guihua Yu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

75 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Water-soluble volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are widely spread in the natural hydrological cycle, contaminating potential water sources, and leading to unexpected ecological hazards. However, water-purification technologies toward VOCs are energy-intensive and present unsatisfactory purity of the obtained water. The fundamental challenge is to differentiate the motion of water and VOC molecules by separators. Here, the concept of a super water-extracting gel (SWEG) for VOC-management and water purification via direct solar distillation is proposed. The strong hydrogen bonding effect in the hypercrosslinked hydrophilic polymeric networks enables the SWEG to extract water from VOC-containing water, which rejects the VOC solutes while allowing water through for interfacial evaporation. The obtained SWEG achieves a VOCs removal ratio up to 99.99% by solar distillation under 1 sun. A solar water-purification system is also demonstrated to produce clean water, which surpasses other competitive technologies based on electricity.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2110548
JournalAdvanced Materials
Volume34
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24 Mar 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • hydrogels
  • hypercrosslinked polymers
  • solar vapor generation
  • volatile organic compound removal
  • water purification

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