Interfacial engineering of MXene-based composite aerogel for high-performance, multifunctional solar steam generator

MXene, an emerging two-dimensional material, has shown its evident application prospects in solar-driven interfacial water evaporation due to excellent photothermal conversion capability. However, MXene still suffers from a few undesirable characteristics in this scenario, including weak stability, self-stacking, and suboptimal optical absorption. To address these issues, in this paper, we fabricated a MXene-based composite aerogel, featuring with interconnected porous structure, broad and high solar absorption, good wettability and photothermal capacity. As our judicious structural and compositional design for the aerogel decreased the evaporation enthalpy of water, the solar steam generator based on the aerogel exhibited an outstanding water evaporation rate as high as 2.31 kg m−2 h−1 under one sun irradiation (and the corresponding solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency reached 90.8 %). Additionally, the aerogel was also designed with an excellent adsorption capacity for removal of heavy metal ions from water as well as a good antibacterial ability, which should be helpful in dealing with the complex working environments for solar steam generators. This work may shed light on the design and development of multifunctional solar steam generators toward practical and sustainable applications.