Photothermic-catalytic bifunctionality of boron-doped molybdenum disulfide nanosheets enabling simultaneous solar evaporation and antibiotic destruction

Exploiting efficient solar evaporators with photothermic-catalytic bifunctionality has been identified as a reliable strategy for alleviating pollutant enrichment when using organic wastewater as a water source to produce freshwater during solar evaporation. Herein, a new boron-doped molybdenum disulfide (B-MoS 2 ) is introduced as a photoabsorber and catalytic unit to create bifunctional solar evaporator, which demonstrates synergistic process of photothermal conversion and catalytic activation to achieve simultaneous freshwater production and antibiotic destruction in tetracycline (TC)-containing wastewater with peroxymonosulfate (PMS). The B-MoS 2 evaporator displays a superior evaporation rate of ∼ 2.31 kg·m −2 ·h −1 and a high degradation efficiency of 80.7 % within one hour for TC solution under 1-sun irradiation. The combined radical/nonradical pathways are found to dominate the TC degradation, and efficient detoxification is realized over the PMS-coupled B-MoS 2 evaporator. This work provides new avenues to produce freshwater from wastewater sources with the alleviated pollutant enrichment during solar evaporation.