![]() Under lower light conditions to mimic a cloudy sky, it took up to 20 minutes for the material to release a similar amount of stored water. The resulting hydrogel was found to absorb water at room temperature and, after being heated by the artificial light with a heat equivalent to that of the sun, released 70% of its stored water in 10 minutes, four times faster than a previously reported absorber gel. A mixture of water and ethylene glycol was used as a polymerization medium to produce a PNIPAm hydrogel with an interconnected open pore structure, before coating its inner pores with polydopamine (PDA) and poly(sulfobetaine methacrylate). However, standard PNIPAm gels can’t produce clean water sufficiently quickly due to their closed-off pores.Īs reported in ACS Central Science , this led the team to investigate copying the structure of natural loofahs due to their large, open and interconnected pores in a PNIPAm-based hydrogel. One approach has been to use temperature-responsive hydrogels such as poly( N-isopropyl acrylamide) (PNIPAm), which switch from absorbing water at cooler temperatures to repelling it on being heated. While other sunlight-driven evaporation processes can purify water, they are less effective when it is cloudy, and tend to produce only a few gallons of water per day. ![]() ![]() Their sunlight-powered hydrogel absorbs polluted water at room temperature before quickly releasing purified water when heated, enough for a person’s daily requirements. With accessing clean water being increasingly difficult due to population rise and greater contamination of freshwater sources, researchers at Princeton University have developed a porous solar absorber gel for water purification inspired by the loofah sponge.
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