Design of spherical carbon materials for seawater desalination

Faced with the challenge of global freshwater scarcity, solar interfacial evaporation is considered a promising strategy to solve the water crisis. However, the phenomenon of salt crystals depositing on the surface of seawater desalination materials inhibits their interfacial evaporation efficiency, hindering further development of this technology. Natural tree trunks have a large number of vertically and horizontally connected channels inside, which can not only transport and store water, but also spontaneously regulate solute concentrations to maintain balance. Inspired by this, carbonized wooden balls were obtained from spherical wood as raw material through a simple carbonization method, and used as evaporators for solar interfacial evaporation. By changing the diameter of carbonized wooden balls, the absorption area and evaporation efficiency can be increased, thereby improving the utilization rate of light energy. Meanwhile, carbonized wooden balls can remove salt particles deposited on their surface through spin rotation. This clever design not only improves the seawater desalination efficiency of carbonized wooden balls, but also avoids the cost of manual desalination. This study provides an extremely simple method for preparing solar interfacial evaporators, which provides a possible idea for solving the problem of cumbersome preparation methods for seawater desalination materials in the future.