Synergic solar interfacial evaporation with heterogenous electro-Fenton: A near zero-discharge approach for water purification

Solar driven interfacial evaporation (SDIE) is an emerging technique to address the global freshwater crisis, but its application is beset by the co-exist organics in water. Herein, a novel SDIE integrated with heterogeneous electro-Fenton (he-EF) system was proposed to achieve a near zero-discharge of organics with simultaneously enhanced vaporization in a continuous siphon mode. The coupled he-EF not only prevented the enrichment of volatile organic compounds in the distilled water, but also avoided the production of the organics-concentrated water, resulting in no phenol residues detected in both distilled and outlet water. Meanwhile, the Joule heating from electrochemical reaction was applied as a supplementary heat source to accelerate steam generation, ensuring an evaporation rate of 1.2 times of that for bare SDIE. Besides, the he-EF assisted SDIE also presented an excellent environmental tolerance to pH 3 ∼ 9 and stability during evaporating phenol-added natural water in 5 cycles. This work is believed to open an avenue to develop high-performance synergic SIDE to achieve near zero discharge of organics for potential in-depth water treatment.