The application of solar-driven water evaporation process in clean water production via solar distillation
is recently intensively investigated. The phase change and mass
transfer processes during the solar-driven water evaporation process can
directly leave behind the salts, heavy metals, organic dyes, etc and simultaneously produce the clean water vapor. However, if the water source is contaminated by volatile organic compounds (VOCs), solar-driven water evaporation may accelerate VOCs volatile and enrich them in the condensate. In this work, the enrichment of VOCs in distillate water was first demonstrated and a multi-functional honeycomb ceramic plate was fabricated by coating a layer of CuFeMnO4 on the surface of a cordierite honeycomb ceramic substrate. The honeycomb structure
was beneficial for light trapping and energy recycling and thus to
improve the solar-to-water evaporation efficiency. The CuFeMnO4 coating layer
acted as both the photothermal material for solar-driven water
evaporation process and the catalyst for VOCs removal via heterogeneous
photon-Fenton reaction. With the integration of photo-Fenton reaction
into the solar distillation process, the clean distillate water was
produced with efficient removal of the potential VOCs from the
contaminated water sources.
