A novel composite hydrogel for solar evaporation enhancement at air-water interface

This paper reports a facile approach to synthesize a novel composite hydrogel with graphene oxide (GO), silica aerogel (SA), acrylamide (AM), and poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) through physical and chemical cross-linking method. The composite hydrogel (GO/SA PAM-PVA hydrogel) exhibits excellent solar evaporation property, good water transmission capacity, and floatability. The GO nanosheets dispersed homogeneously in the hydrogel could provide prominent photothermal conversion efficiency to heat water for evaporation. Excellent hydrophilicity of hydrogel promotes the water molecules transport from the bottom to the top of the hydrogel, which can increase evaporation efficiency. The SA in the hydrogel makes the GO/SA PAM-PVA hydrogel floatable, which is crucial for improving evaporation efficiency because evaporation occurs primarily at several molecular layers on the surface of the water. Furthermore, the self-cleaning ability derived from SA of the GO/SA PAM-PVA hydrogel surface provides a convenient recycling and reusing process for practical applications. The evaporation mass of seawater achieved by the GO/SA PAM-PVA hydrogel is 6 times higher than that of traditional process at an optical density of 2 kW m−2 for 30 min. Meanwhile, the evaporation efficiency of GO/SA PAM-PVA hydrogel remains good during reuse.