Creating active pure water from salty water harvesting solar energy-irradiated renewable photocatalysts

Background Water scarcity and sustainable development are global issues, which we are facing today. Traditional reverse osmosis and multi-stage flash distillation for producing drinking water from seawater still exist many economic and environmental problems. Methods We harvest solar energy-irradiated renewable photocatalysts of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), creation of active pure water is practical via efficient water evaporation for desalination. Imitation seawater of bulk deionized water (DIW) containing 3.5 wt% NaCl salt (DIW-S) is placed in a transparent dish containing ceramic-supported AuNPs under solar energy-driven resonant illumination. Significant Findings Utilizing hot electron transfer (HET) the obtained plasmon-activated water solution (PAW-S) features an electron-doping structure and reduced hydrogen bonds (HBs), which significantly differed from properties of the blank solution (DIW-B) which had no AuNPs on ceramics during preparation. These novel properties of PAW-S made it ca. 20% more efficient at evaporating under the same evaporation conditions. Moreover, the prepared PAW-S and its correspondingly evaporated and condensed water (PAW-C) were active, which was exemplified by their ability to scavenge free 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radicals due to their electron-doping structures and to easily penetrate and diffuse into smaller pores of artificial skin due to their smaller water clusters, resulting from the markedly reduced HB structure.