Carbon fiber coated by quinoa cellulose nanosheet with outstanding scaled salt self-cleaning performance and purification of organic and antibiotic contaminated water

To date, various solar driven evaporation technologies have been developed for treatment of seawater and wastewater but with the threat from salt polluted and single treatment of seawater. Herein, we develop a multifunctional evaporator constructed by carbon fiber coated by quinoa cellulose nanosheet (CFQC) with outstanding self-cleaning performance and good purification property for treatment of organic and antibiotic polluted water. The resulting Zn-CFQC exhibits good light to thermal performance which can absorb about 86.95% lights in the range of UV–Vis–NIR (200–2500 nm); therefore, the wet and dry surface temperatures of Zn-CFQC are held at 62.1 and 124.3 °C respectively, and keep a speed of 3.2 kg m(−2) h(−1) for water evaporating under 1000 W m(−2) illumination. Such good light-to-thermal capabilities can be mainly imputed to the unique surface microstructures of the carbon fiber which decorated by two-dimension cellulose and activated by ZnCl(2). Additionally, Zn-CFQC shows good salt automatic-cleaning capability at night and corresponding mechanism has been simply elucidated according to the chemical potential theory. The method of treatment of carbon fiber opens a new way for commercial carbon fiber utilization of solar assisted water purification.