Robust and Low-Cost Flame-Treated Wood for High-Performance Solar Steam Generation

Solar-enabled steam generation has attracted increasing interest in recent years because of its potential applications in power generation, desalination, and wastewater treatment, among others. Recent studies have reported many strategies for promoting the efficiency of steam generation by employing absorbers based on carbon materials or plasmonic metal nanoparticles with well-defined pores. In this work, we report that natural wood can be utilized as an ideal solar absorber after a simple flame treatment. With ultrahigh solar absorbance (∼99%), low thermal conductivity (0.33 W m–1 K–1), and good hydrophilicity, the flame-treated wood can localize the solar heating at the evaporation surface and enable a solar-thermal efficiency of ∼72% under a solar intensity of 1 kW m–2, and it thus represents a renewable, scalable, low-cost, and robust material for solar steam applications.