Integrating a Metal–Organic Framework into Natural Spruce Wood for Efficient Solar-Powered Water Evaporation

With the increase in water consumption and pollution resulting from the rising world population and industrial development, severe fresh water shortage has been regarded as one of the critical problems facing the world. Solar-driven water purification is an environment friendly and promising technology to address the problem. However, low photothermal conversion efficiency impedes its practical application. Herein, a natural spruce wood-based solar evaporator functionalized with zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF-8) nanoparticles and polydopamine (PDA) layers is designed, which significantly reduces the equivalent evaporation enthalpy and substantially boosts solar evaporation efficiency. The evaporation rate of the optimized wood-based evaporator reached 2.28 kg m−2 h−1 with a high evaporation efficiency of 87.5% under 1.0 sun. Furthermore, the integrated spruce wood/ZIF-8/PDA hybrids can remove organic pollutants after solar evaporation. Notably, the constructed multifunctional solar evaporator takes advantage of sustainable solar energy, low-cost biomass, and ZIF-8/PDA nanostructures to acquire desirable performance in water evaporation and sewage purification.