Advances in Solar-Driven Hygroscopic Water Harvesting.

Water scarcity is one of the greatest global challenges at this time. Significant efforts have been made to harvest water from the air, due to widely available water sources present in the atmosphere. Particularly, solar-driven hygroscopic water harvesting based on the adsorption-desorption process has gained tremendous attention because of the abundance of solar energy in combination with substantial improvements in conversion efficiency enabled by advanced sorbents, improved photothermal materials, interfacial heating system designs, and thermal management in recent years.

Tuning Transpiration by Interfacial Solar Absorber-Leaf Engineering.

Plant transpiration, a process of water movement through a plant and its evaporation from aerial parts especially leaves, consumes a large component of the total continental precipitation (≈48%) and significantly influences global water distribution and climate. To date, various chemical and/or biological explorations have been made to tune the transpiration but with uncertain environmental risks. In recent years, interfacial solar steam/vapor generation is attracting a lot of attention for achieving high energy transfer efficiency.

Direct Conversion of Perovskite Thin Films into Nanowires with Kinetic Control for Flexible Optoelectronic Devices.

With significant progress in the past decade, semiconductor nanowires have demonstrated unique features compared to their thin film counterparts, such as enhanced light absorption, mechanical integrity and reduced therma conductivity, etc. However, technologies of semiconductor thin film still serve as foundations of several major industries, such as electronics, displays, energy, etc. A direct path to convert thin film to nanowires can build a bridge between these two and therefore facilitate the large-scale applications of nanowires.

Photogenerated carriers transfer in dye-graphene-SnO2 composites for highly efficient visible-light photocatalysis.

The visible-light-driven photocatalytic activities of graphene-semiconductor catalysts have recently been demonstrated, however, the transfer pathway of photogenerated carriers especially where the role of graphene still remains controversial. Here we report graphene-SnO2 aerosol nanocomposites that exhibit more superior dye adsorption capacity and photocatalytic efficiency compared with pure SnO2 quantum dots, P25 TiO2, and pure graphene aerosol under the visible light. This study examines the origin of the visible-light-driven photocatalysis, which for the first time links to the synergistic effect of the cophotosensitization of the dye and graphene to SnO2.