A Composite Fabric with Dual Functions for High-Performance Water Purification

The dilemma of diminishing freshwater resources caused by water pollution has always impacted human life. Solar-driven interfacial evaporation technology has the potential for freshwater production via solar-driven distillation. However, in solar-driven interfacial evaporation technology, it is difficult to overcome the problem of wastewater containing various contaminants. In this work, we propose a bifunctional fabric created by depositing titanium dioxide@carbon black nanoparticles onto cotton fabric (TiO(2)@CB/CF). The TiO(2)@CB/CF has a coupling effect that includes the photothermal effect of CB and photocatalysis of TiO(2), and it can not only generate clean water but can also purify contaminated water. The resulting bifunctional fabric can achieve an outstanding water evaporation rate of 1.42 kg m(−2) h(−1) and a conversion efficiency of 90.4% in methylene blue (MB) solution under one-sun irradiation. Simultaneously, the TiO(2)@CB/CF demonstrates a high photocatalytic degradation of 57% for MB solution after 2 h with light irradiation. It still shows a good photocatalysis effect, even when reused in an MB solution for eight cycles. Furthermore, the TiO(2)@CB/CF delivers excellent performance for actual industrial textile dyeing wastewater. This bifunctional fabric has a good application prospect and will provide a novel way to resolve the issue of freshwater scarcity.