An experimental exploration of generating electricity from nature-inspired hierarchical evaporator: The role of electrode materials

Abstract

It is a challenge to harvest both electricity and freshwater from the oceans. This communication demonstrates that the natural-inspired hierarchical evaporator based on multi-walled carbon nanotubes can generate electricity via water evaporation for freshwater production. Furthermore, for the first time, the effect of the nature of exposed electrodes in an electrolyte solution and the distance between two electrodes on the generation of electricity is carefully investigated. We found that the natural-inspired hierarchical evaporator could generate electricity for all time of the day. The proposed natural-inspired hierarchical evaporator is scalable, feasible, and low-cost, providing great potential for direct industrial applications of solar energy on clean water and electricity generations for all time of the day. Moreover, this work also provides additional evidence unravel how electricity is generated by water flow on the surface of carbon materials.