High efficient solar evaporation by airing multifunctional textile

Abstract: Solar evaporation is important for many applications such as desalination, power generation and industrial drying. Recently, some studies on evaporation reported obtaining high energy efficiency and evaporation rate, which are based on floating evaporation setup (FES) with nanomaterials. Here, we proposed a new cheap and simple setup, named as airing evaporation setup (AES). It shows that the energy efficiency of AES reaches up to 87 % under 1 kW/m2 of solar irradiation, which is 14% higher than that of FES. Meanwhile, the total evaporation rate of AES is about 20% higher than that of FES. The theoretical analysis reveals that the main reason for a better performance of AES is the increasing evaporation area. More interesting, AES could be used for designing portable systems due to its simplicity and flexibility. Furthermore, we show that AES and the corresponding wick material can be used in solar desalination, textile quick-drying and warm-keeping.