Large-scale hierarchically porous polydopamine loaded rattan-based solar evaporator with high stability to salinity changes

As a convenient photothermal material, polydopamine (PDA) has been widely utilized in wood-based evaporators. However, the loading conditions of polydopamine on biomass bulk materials have not been systematically studied. In this paper, the suitable reaction conditions of polydopamine were studied with rattan as the substrate, and a reference for the improvement of the loading conditions was proposed. The polydopamine-loaded rattan-based evaporator (PDA-R) prepared on this basis exhibits excellent working stability due to the unique large-scale hierarchical porous structure of rattan. In addition to excellent salt resistance and cycle performance (evaporation rate decays by 5.1% after 30 cycles), the larger-aperture channel (200–450 μm) also brings better adaptability to salinity changes than polydopamine-loaded basswood-based evaporator (PDA-BW) (the attenuation coefficient of PDA-R is 6.2%, while the attenuation coefficient of PDA-BW is 16.3%). All of these indicate the broad prospects of polydopamine-loaded rattan-based evaporator as a multi-effect treatment scheme of brine.