Facile Synthesis of Carbon Dots Incorporated Carbonized Pomelo Peel by One-Step Method for Enhanced Solar Evaporation

Solar evaporation can be enhanced by incorporating carbon dots (CDs) decorated onto base materials. However, existing literature primarily focuses on multi-step synthesis methods involving separate preparation of CDs and base materials. This study proposes a novel one-step method for synthesizing CDs decorating carbonized pomelo peel ([email protected]) composites for solar evaporation. The pomelo peel itself acted as the carbon source and base material. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, the properties of [email protected] were compared with those of another CDs-decorated carbonized pomelo peel composite (CDs-CPP) prepared through the conventional multi-step method. Additionally, the role of CDs was also demonstrated by comparing carbonized pomelo peel (CPP) and its CDs-based composites (CDs-CPP). The resultant three different materials (CPP, CDs-CPP, and [email protected]) were then characterized to identify their structure, chemical components, wettability, and other properties. The results demonstrate significant improvements in sample properties due to the introduction of CDs and the advantages of the proposed one-step method. The resultant materials were then tested in solar evaporation experiments, revealing that CDs-CPP observed an increase of around 3 times and 1.5 times in the evaporation rate compared with the pure water system and CPP system, respectively. Notably, these values increased to 5 and 2.2, respectively, in the [email protected] system. Moreover, [email protected] exhibited a solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency of 120%, with an evaporation rate of 2.43 kg∙m−2∙h−1 at one sun illumination. This work highlights the performance of our proposed one-step method and provides new insights for synthesizing CDs decorated biomass composites for efficient solar evaporation.