A hierarchical porous aerohydrogel for enhanced water evaporation

Natural solar-powered steam generation provides a promising strategy to deal with deteriorating water resources. However, the practical applications of this strategy are limited by the tedious manufacturing of structures at micro-nano levels to concentrate heat and transport water to heat-localized regions. Herein, this work reports the fabrication of hierarchically porous aerohydrogel with enhanced light absorption and thermal localization at the air-solid interface. This aerohydrogel steam generator is fabricated by a simple yet controllable micropore generation approach to assemble air and hydrogel into hierarchically porous gas-solid hybrids. The tunable micropore size in a wide range from 99±49µm to 316±58μm not only enables contrasting sunlight absorptance (0.2 - 2.5µm) by reducing the reflection of solar light but also harnesses water transportation to the heating region via a capillary force-driven liquid flow. Therefore, a solar-vapor conversion efficiency of 91.3% under one sun irradiation was achieved using this aerohydrogel evaporator, reaching a ready evaporation rate of 2.76kg m-2 h-1 and 3.71kg m-2 h-1 under one and two sun irradiations, respectively. Our work provides a versatile and scalable approach to engineering porous hydrogels for highly efficient steam generation and opens an avenue for other potential practical applications based on this aerohydrogel.