Carbon nanotubes decorated hollow metal–organic frameworks for efficient solar-driven atmospheric water harvesting
Introduction
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of highly crystalline porous materials with unique topological types, assembled by the bonding of metal ions or clusters with diverse organic linkers to form infinite one, two or three dimensional frameworks[1], [2], [3]. MOFs typically exhibit high surface area and porosity for various applications, such as electromagnetic wave absorption[4], biomedicine[5], gas adsorption or removal of heavy metal ions[6], [7], [8], photocatalytic degradation of toxic dyes[9] and so on[10].
As one of the most important materials for adsorption-based water collection system, the water adsorption capacity and desorption rate of MOFs determine the efficiency of water collection[11]. The pore environment (porosity, specific surface area, pore size and distribution) and the affinity of MOFs for water dominate water adsorption capacity [12]. In recent years, introducing hydrophilic functional groups, post-synthetic modification, combined polymers/salts with MOFs have been carried out to improve the adsorption capacity and transport performance for atmospheric water harvesting[3], [13], [14]. For the desorption process, it is necessary to consider the desorption temperature and the interaction between MOFs and water molecules. Unlike zeolite and deliquescent salt with strong affinity to water molecules, above 160 °C is requested to achieve efficient water desorption[15], [16]. On the contrary, the interaction between MOFs and water molecules is relatively weak. It has shown that the unsaturated metal sites of MOFs can act as new binding sites to attract more water molecules by hydrogen bonds [17]. However, the regenerated temperatures of most MOFs are still higher than 80 °C [14].
Recently, solar-driven water release has aroused great interest[2], [18]. Unfortunately, most MOFs are white or light-colored with poor light absorption ability and low photothermal performance[19], [20], [21], resulting in limited sunlight utilization efficiency. In order to improve the desorption rate of water, electric heating strips, solar cells or coated black light-absorbing layers on the surface of water collection equipment have been utilized to promote the release of water. These greatly increase the complexity and operating cost [22], [23], [24]. Such as Nikita Hanikel etc.[25] applied a solar module to heat the MOFs layer in atmospheric water generators (AWG). However, a typical AWG was estimated to consume ∼ 100 W, and the conversion efficiency of solar PV was very low, about 20–25%[26], [27], [28]; Farhad Fathieh etc.[23] mixed graphite with MOF-801 to enhance light absorption. However, the graphite significantly declined the water adsorption capacity, and releasing only 39% and 76% water under low and high solar fluxes, respectively. How to improve the photothermal performance of MOFs materials without adversely affecting the water capture capacity has become a challenge.
It has shown that hollow MOFs can increase the concentration of the local reactants and promote the reaction kinetics, facilitate the multi-level reflection light path to enhance light absorption, improve the catalysis and separation performance [29], [30], [31]. Hollow MOFs can fabricated by etching[32], layer-by-layer growth[31], Ostwald ripening[33] and template processes [34]. Among them, etching is a simple and efficient way. The hierarchical porous MOFs formed by etching will favorable for substrate transportation. In addition, more defects and exposed active sites benefit for water adsorption by forming chemical interaction or hydrogen bonds with water molecules[35].
As aforementioned, in order to achieve high water capture ability and fast solar-driven desorption kinetics of MOFs-based atmospheric water harvesting device, in this work, we synthesized highly water-adsorbed photothermal composite consisted of hollow MIL-101(Cr) MOFs and photo-thermal agents (carbon nanotubes, CNTs). Due to the high structural stability and water adsorption capacity of hollow MIL-101(Cr) [14], [36], [37] and nice thermal conductivity, photothermal conversion ability and structure stability of CNTs[38], [39], [40], the resulted hollow MIL-101(Cr) MOFs/carbon nanotubes (HMC-2) composite demonstrates nice water adsorption capacity and fast adsorption and desorption. The desorption of water is realized under simulated sunlight quickly. This strategy sheds light on the development of photothermal adsorbents for water capture with easy regeneration.
Section snippets
Chemicals and materials
Chromium nitrate (Cr(NO3)3·9H2O, 99%, AR), terephthalic acid (H2BDC) (C8H6O4, 99%, AR) were obtained from Aladdin. Ethanol (C2H6O, 99%, AR), glacial acetic acid (CH3COOH, AR) and N, N-dimethylformamide (DMF, AR) were obtained from Sinopharm Chemical Reagent Co., Ltd. The carboxylic single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs, 1.5 mg mL−1) aqueous dispersion was obtained from Nanjing XFNANO Materials Tech Co., Ltd. Deionized (DI) water (18.2 MΩ, from Milli-Q system) was used throughout the experiments.
Structure and morphology characterization
The chemical structure design and fabrication process of porous hollow MIL-101/CNTs (HMC) composites are illustrated in Scheme 1. Briefly, HMC composites can be obtained by hydrothermal reaction, acid etching, and mixing with CNTs. Non-etched MIL-101/CNTs composites were also synthesized for comparison (See details in Experiment Section). Figure S1a and S2a show that MIL-101 has an octahedral structure. While the etched MIL-101 hold an irregular morphology with obvious cavities (Figure S1d and
Conclusions
In summary, a highly water-adsorbed photothermal composite was designed for atmospheric water harvesting by combining photothermal CNTs with MIL-101 hollow particles. The hierarchical porous hollow structure of HMC-2 not only has abundant unsaturated metal sites and defects to endow them with significant water capture ability under low humidity, but also facilitates water transport and storage. The maximum water uptake of HMC at 90%RH is 1.074 g/g. The water adsorption capacity of HMC-2 in low
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Major R & D plan of Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (LD18E020001), the Key program of National Natural Science and Foundation (51632008), and the National Natural Science Foundations of China (21875212).
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