Researchers have recently focused on the advancement of new materials from biorenewable and sustainable sources because of great concerns about the environment, waste accumulation and destruction, and the inevitable depletion of fossil resources. Biorenewable materials have been extensively used as a matrix or reinforcement in many applications. In the development of innovative methods and materials, composites offer important advantages because of their excellent properties such as ease of fabrication, higher mechanical properties, high thermal stability, and many more. Especially, nanocomposites (obtained by using biorenewable sources) have significant advantages when compared to conventional composites. Nanocomposites have been utilized in many applications including food, biomedical, electroanalysis, energy storage, wastewater treatment, automotive, etc. This comprehensive review provides chemistry, structures, advanced applications, and recent developments about nanocomposites obtained from biorenewable sources.

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Chemistry, Structures, and Advanced Applications of Nanocomposites from Biorenewable Resources.

Seawater desalination is viewed as a promising solution to world freshwater scarcity. Solar assisted desalination is proposed to overcome the high energy consumption in current desalination technologies, as it uses abundant and sustainable solar energy as the only energy input. Interfacial solar vapor generation (SVG) has attracted considerable research interest due to its high energy conversion efficiency, simple implementation, and cost-effectiveness. Among all the candidate materials for solar evaporators, carbon-based materials stand out due to their intrinsic high solar absorption, highly tunable structure, easy preparation, low cost, and earth-abundancy. In this review, the recent progress on carbon-based materials for the development of interfacial SVG is summarized. First, a brief introduction to the basic design principles of the interfacial SVG system is presented. Then, recent efforts in carbon-based solar evaporators, from artificial structures to bioinspired configurations, focusing on their structure-function relationship are highlighted. Strategies for designing antisalt-fouling desalination systems are also summarized. Last, the challenges and opportunities of carbon-based materials for solar evaporation technology are elaborated.

Carbon Materials for Solar Water Evaporation and Desalination.

The main challenges of a solar steam generation device based on biomass materials are complicated processing techniques and relatively low efficiency. To solve these problems, we reported a simple immersion treatment method by depositing polydopamine (PDA) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) on natural wood to prepare a novel solar interface evaporation device. Ag-PDA@wood exhibits a unique bilayer structure. The absorbance of the top light absorption layer is higher than 96% in a wide wavelength range (300-2500 nm). Owing to the synergistic photothermal effect between PDA and AgNPs, Ag-PDA@wood has ultrafast solar-thermal response (a temperature increase of 42.5 °C within 5 min under 1 sun), and more heat is located at the steam generation interface (the surface temperature is 45.1 °C). The natural wood layer at the bottom with low thermal conductivity provides sufficient water supply and reduces the bulk heat loss. A high evaporation rate of 1.58 kg m-2 h-1 is achieved using Ag-PDA@wood under 1 sun (1 kW m-2). Its evaporation efficiency reaches 88.6%. The results upon sewage treatment and seawater desalination indicate that Ag-PDA@wood has an excellent purification ability and self-desalting capacity. More importantly, when compared to traditional solar evaporators, Ag-PDA@wood exhibits high antibacterial activity. The result of this antibacterial experiment shows that this material almost completely kills harmful bacteria. Therefore, Ag-PDA@wood has a high application potential in seawater desalination and sewage purification, providing a significant incentive to solve the problem of insufficient freshwater supply.

Wood-Based Solar Interface Evaporation Device with Self-Desalting and High Antibacterial Activity for Efficient Solar Steam Generation.

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) are emerging catalyst materials with inner layer water molecules and higher anion exchange capacity. They have been extensively used as catalyst materials owing to their high specific surface area, environmental friendliness, lower cost, and non-toxicity. However, the lower surface area and leaching of metal ions from LDHs composites reduce the process efficiency of the catalyst. Modifying the LDHs materials with other materials can improve the surface properties of the composite and enhance the catalytic performance. Herein, this review aims to summarize the recent progress of nanostructured modified LDHs materials, their classification, synthesis, and a detailed discussion on their characterization techniques. Further, this study also discusses the application of nanostructured modified LDHs materials as catalysts in advanced oxidation process (AOPs) for various organic pollutants removal. 

Nanostructured modified layered double hydroxides (LDHs)-based catalysts: A review on synthesis, characterization, and applications in water remediation by advanced oxidation processes

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) are emerging catalyst materials with inner layer water molecules and higher anion exchange capacity. They have been extensively used as catalyst materials owing to their high specific surface area, environmental friendliness, lower cost, and non-toxicity. However, the lower surface area and leaching of metal ions from LDHs composites reduce the process efficiency of the catalyst. Modifying the LDHs materials with other materials can improve the surface properties of the composite and enhance the catalytic performance. Herein, this review aims to summarize the recent progress of nanostructured modified LDHs materials, their classification, synthesis, and a detailed discussion on their characterization techniques. Further, this study also discusses the application of nanostructured modified LDHs materials as catalysts in advanced oxidation process (AOPs) for various organic pollutants removal.

Wood is gaining increasing attention in applications related to solar steam generation because of its porous structure with microchannels, low heat conduction properties, highly hydrophilic properties and renewability. Wood surface modification is required to improve steam generation performance because of its low optical absorptivity. Unfortunately, the high energy consumption fabrication process and high cost of current photothermal conversion coatings on wood impede its large-scale application. This study develops a facile pyrrole polymerization method to acquire polypyrrole decorated wood (PPy–wood) for solar evaporation enhancement. The black PPy decoration considerably improves the wood light absorption, resulting in a high absorbance (>90%) of PPy–wood within a broad wavelength range, from the ultraviolet region to the near infrared region (300–2500 nm). The combination of advantages related to wood (microchanneled porous structure, high hydrophilicity and thermal insulation) and PPy (broadband and high solar absorption capacity) for easy and fast steam generation makes PPy–wood an ideal solar steam generator, which shows rapid evaporation abilities (1.014 kg m−2 h−1) and high evaporation efficiency (72.5%) under simulated one sun irradiation. Moreover, the obtained clean water using PPy–wood as the steam generator shows low ion concentrations and high transmittance, demonstrating that PPy–wood possesses excellent potential for seawater desalination and sewage treatment. Thus, such PPy–wood is a potential candidate for water desalination and purification to address water scarcity issues through the effective utilization of clean energy.

A wood–polypyrrole composite as a photothermal conversion device for solar evaporation enhancement

Bamboo decorated with plasmonic nanoparticles for efficient solar steam generation

Facile fabrication of a PDMS @ stearic acid-Al(OH)3 coating on lignocellulose composite with superhydrophobicity and flame retardancy

Superhydrophobic and antibacterial wood enabled by polydopamine-assisted decoration of copper nanoparticles

Vapor generation by means of harvesting solar energy is an energy-saving, environmentally friendly and efficient method to achieve seawater desalination and water purification. However, solar vapor generation is subjected to poor utilization efficiency of solar energy or it depends on expensive solar absorption materials and complex processes. In this work, inspired by tree transpiration in nature, a novel wood-based vapor generator composed of wood substrates with 3D microchannels and a candle soot decoration surface was designed and developed. Profiting from the simultaneous optimization of the candle soot-decorated wood (CS-wood) properties (hydrophilic wood substrates with microchannels for water transportation and escape, low heat conduction value, and a black CS decoration surface with high solar absorbing abilities), the as-fabricated CS-wood vapor generation material achieved a relatively high net evaporation rate value of 0.950 kg m−2 h−1 when being illuminated at one sun. This bilayer wood-based vapor generator exhibited good capacities of desalination (seawater) and purification (lake water). Such wood-based material as a high-performance, cost-efficient and scalable vapor generator can be a potential candidate for the production of clean water to alleviate the global clean water shortage crisis via the effective utilization of green energy.

Zhe Wang

Papers

A wood–polypyrrole composite as a photothermal conversion device for solar evaporation enhancement

Bamboo decorated with plasmonic nanoparticles for efficient solar steam generation

Facile fabrication of a PDMS @ stearic acid-Al(OH)3 coating on lignocellulose composite with superhydrophobicity and flame retardancy

Superhydrophobic and antibacterial wood enabled by polydopamine-assisted decoration of copper nanoparticles

Candle soot nanoparticle-decorated wood for efficient solar vapor generation