Enhanced Photothermal Conversion through 2D/0D Nano-Heterojunction Engineering for Highly Efficient Solar Desalination

作者：Honglei Wang, Yifan Bo, Hongguang Wang, Malte Klingenhof, Zhehao Tao, Dong Wang, Bing Wu, Adrián Tamayo, Bin Han, Pengfei Cheng, Peter A. van Aken, Zdeněk Sofer, Runfeng Chen, Peter Strasser, Peter Schaaf, Dirk M. Guldi, Paolo Samorı́ · 发表于：Journal of the American Chemical Society · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1021/jacs.5c07491 · 被引用次数：15 · 研究领域：Solar-Powered Water Purification Methods、Membrane Separation Technologies、Solar Thermal and Photovoltaic Systems

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are promising candidates for solar-driven desalination. However, conventional photothermal 2D materials like transition metal carbides and nitrides (MXenes) as well as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) suffer from major limitations such as their complex synthesis and low photothermal conversion efficiency. In contrast, metal phosphorus trichalcogenides (MPCh 3 ) do not display the same drawbacks and possess widely tunable bandgaps (1.2–3.5 eV), making them ideal candidates for solar desalination. Moreover, their properties and applications related to light–matter interactions can be further enhanced by coupling with other low-dimensional nanostructures, tailoring hybrid van der Waals heterostructures of mixed dimensionality. Herein, we report the synthesis of FePS 3 nanosheets/carbon nanodots (CNDs) 2D/0D nanoheterojunctions and their photothermal response when integrated into a 3D photothermal evaporator. These nanoheterojunctions exhibited high photothermal conversion performance, with an average absorbance of 90.6% from the UV to the NIR and a temperature increase of 42 °C over the blank control under 1 sun illumination for 300 s. A high water evaporation rate of 1.68 kg m –2 h –1 was observed under the same condition. Photothermal conversion and water evaporation experiments, along with femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy (fs-TAS), photoluminescence (PL) analysis, and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations, revealed...