Janus black cellulose paper for fast volume reduction of liquid pollutant using solar steam generation

Abstract Recently, radioactive wastes are inevitable by-product due to rapid development and use of nuclear energy. Especially, there are large amount of liquid radioactive wastes to control nuclear fission reaction at nuclear generating station. In order to reduce total volume of solution state radioactive wastes, people have used solar evaporation without any specific instrument and it takes long time to get liquid state concentrated radioactive waste which is inefficient process. Herein we propose Janus-type membrane with different surface hydrophilicity toward efficient solar steam generation to concentrate radioactive liquid wastes. We used vapor deposition polymerization method to introduce polypyrrole (Py) and polystyrene (PS) on the top and bottom side of a cellulose paper. Py coating broadens the absorption wavelength range for enhanced photo-thermal energy conversion. Hydrophobic PS coating not only makes membrane easy to floating on water but also prevents salt accumulation during evaporation. Using this membrane, we can efficiently concentrate polluted water including Cs ion without salt accumulation on membrane, and thus no specific decrement in evaporation efficiency by time.