Super Water‐Extracting Gels for Solar‐Powered Volatile Organic Compounds Management in the Hydrological Cycle

Abstract Water‐soluble volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are widely spread in the natural hydrological cycle, contaminating potential water sources, and leading to unexpected ecological hazards. However, water‐purification technologies toward VOCs are energy‐intensive and present unsatisfactory purity of the obtained water. The fundamental challenge is to differentiate the motion of water and VOC molecules by separators. Here, the concept of a super water‐extracting gel (SWEG) for VOC‐management and water purification via direct solar distillation is proposed. The strong hydrogen bonding effect in the hypercrosslinked hydrophilic polymeric networks enables the SWEG to extract water from VOC‐containing water, which rejects the VOC solutes while allowing water through for interfacial evaporation. The obtained SWEG achieves a VOCs removal ratio up to 99.99% by solar distillation under 1 sun. A solar water‐purification system is also demonstrated to produce clean water, which surpasses other competitive technologies based on electricity.