Lotus leaf as solar water evaporation devices

Recently, a variety of artificial structures have been designed and fabricated to improve energy conversion efficiency. Lotus leaf, a kind of living organism, is famous for its hydrophobic structure on the surface, but here it’s used for solar thermal conversion by changing its surface structure. SEM, XRD, HRTEM, FLIR, Raman and BET results demonstrated that carbonized lotus leaf became hydrophilic. In the evaporation process under a lamp illumination, the mass changed as high as 3.10 kg/(m2h), and the temperature increased to 60.1 °C. These findings not only reveal the potential to treat lotus leaf as a low-cost material for solar water evaporation, but also provide inspiration for the future development of high-performance solar thermal conversion devices.