Guaranteeing Complete Salt Rejection by Channeling Saline Water through Fluidic Photothermal Structure toward Synergistic Zero Energy Clean Water Production and In Situ Energy Generation

The salt fouling issue, which has become the major bottleneck hindering a sustainable solar desalination process in practice. Herein, a fluidic photothermal structure that is able to completely prevent salt formation for durable steam generation while achieving electricity generation during the one-way fluid transportation is reported. By continuously navigating the one-way saline fluid through solar absorber, salt rejection can be completely guaranteed during intense steam generation. The proposed strategy was demonstrated by a polyaniline (PANi)/cellulose bilayer and realized ultrahigh solar efficiency (92%) under 1 Sun illumination. We further show that electricity is synchronously generated via asymmetric deposition of functional carbon materials on capillary wicks, and voltage >0.2 V is readily derived with good scalability. This one-way fluidic structure exhibits favorable universality to nearly all the other planar solar absorbers and multistage solar stills, which would be of great practical significance to long-term solar desalination in the future.