Engineering controllable water transport of biosafety cuttlefish juice solar absorber toward remarkably enhanced solar-driven gas-liquid interfacial evaporation

Abstract Recently, solar-driven gas-liquid interfacial evaporation has mainly concentrated on the improvement of sunlight absorption efficiency while neglecting the regulation of water transportation. The blind pursuit of superwetting material design has ignored using excessive water transport instead to add unnecessary heat loss. Furthermore, the material biosafety also should be focused which can avoid damage to water-source biology and humans during application. Here, we successfully designed a biosafety cuttlefish juice (CJ)-based solar absorber via rotary filling SiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) to optimize the water-transport regulation of SGIE systems, the tailored absorber can block excessive useless water, and effectively reduce heat losses. Hence the absorber has specific and significant advantages: higher evaporation efficiency and fast evaporation response to the entire device, excellent biocompatibility and low-toxicity, IC50 more than 100 mg/ml is observed in the cell viability. In addition, high mechanical properties (pressure≈100 N), multi-size preparation (d ~ 4.25 cm–10.25 cm or bigger), and long-time self-floating (more than 720 h) yield advantages together to achieve an excellent performance evaporator. Therefore, this work provides a new avenue to the design of high performance SGIE by enchanting edge zone effect, controlling water transportation and fabricating with sustainable marine resource.