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3D self-assembly of aluminium nanoparticles for plasmon-enhanced solar desalination

Abstract

Plasmonics has generated tremendous excitement because of its unique capability to focus light into subwavelength volumes1, beneficial for various applications such as light harvesting2,3, photodetection4, sensing5, catalysis6 and so on. Here we demonstrate a plasmon-enhanced solar desalination device, fabricated by the self–assembly of aluminium nanoparticles into a three-dimensional porous membrane. The formed porous plasmonic absorber can float naturally on water surface, efficiently absorb a broad solar spectrum (>96%) and focus the absorbed energy at the surface of the water to enable efficient (90%) and effective desalination (a decrease of four orders of magnitude). The durability of the devices has also been examined, indicating a stable performance over 25 cycles under various illumination conditions. The combination of the significant desalination effect, the abundance and low cost of the materials, and the scalable production processes suggest that this type of plasmon-enhanced solar desalination device could provide a portable desalination solution.

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Figure 1: Fabrication process and characterization of the Al NP-based plasmonic structure.
Figure 2: Broadband absorption of the Al NP/AAM structure.
Figure 3: Set-up and performance of plasmon-enhanced solar desalination.
Figure 4: Desalination performance and the durability of the device.

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Acknowledgements

This work is jointly supported by the State Key Program for Basic Research of China (Grant no. 2015CB659300), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos 11321063, 11574143 and 11204139), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant nos BK20150056 and BK20151079) and the Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD), Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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J.Z. designed research; L.Z., Y.T., J.W. and W.X. performed research; Y.Y. contributed new reagents/analytical tools; W.C., S.Z. and J.Z. analysed data; and L.Z., S.Z. and J.Z. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jia Zhu.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Zhou, L., Tan, Y., Wang, J. et al. 3D self-assembly of aluminium nanoparticles for plasmon-enhanced solar desalination. Nature Photon 10, 393–398 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.75

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