Three birds with one stone: Constructing Janus multilayer carbon fabric to boost solar-driven interfacial evaporation, electrical power generation and inhibit VOCs volatilization

Solar-driven interfacial evaporation technology has great potential to address both the freshwater and energy crises in a low-cost, environmentally friendly, and sustainable method. How to achieve highly efficient freshwater and energy harvesting simultaneously is still challenging. Here, a Janus-structured multilayer carbon fabric (JMCF) solar evaporator is proposed to effectively overcome the bottleneck in the cogeneration of fresh water and electricity. The Janus structure of the multilayer fabric effectively controls water supply upwards, improves light absorption and photothermal conversion, increases evaporation surface area, facilitates water vapor escape and inhibits VOCs volatilization. Accordingly, the optimized JMCF solar evaporator can achieve a high evaporation rate of 3.12 kg m -2 h −1 and an output voltage of 0.577 V in 3.5 wt% seawater under 1 sun irradiation. In addition, the JMCF evaporation system also demonstrates good working stability, self-cleaning capacity, environmental adaptability, and economic feasibility. This work provides new ideas and inspiration for the design of high efficiency solar-driven interfacial evaporation system to address the freshwater scarcity, energy crisis, global change problem, etc.