Facile fabrication of oriented polyethylene terephthalate foams as novel solar interfacial vapor generator from waste bottles

The massive arbitrarily discarded waste of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles become a major environmental pollution source for soils and oceans. Using these waste products to acquire purified water has great significance. We developed a novel strategy of inducing crystallization coupled with solvent exchanging to obtain oriented PET/carbon nanotubes (CNT) foams from waste PET bottles and to fabricate solar interfacial vapor generators (SIVGs). The obtained PET/CNT foams had low densities of 0.18 g/cm(3 )and high specific strength with compressive stress of 1.8 MPa. The PET/CNT foams generated excellent capillary action that the water delivering rate reached 93.60 kg/m(2) h. In addition, the oriented PET foams demonstrated a promising thermal concentration effect that its surface temperature reached 132.8(degrees)C. It could evaporate up to 0.82 kg/m(2) h under the illumination of 1 sun. Meanwhile, the foams with CNT clusters dispersion also exhibited excellent electrical resistance of 3.57 x 10(3) Omega m with a low percolation threshold of 0.5 wt.% CNT. This work provides a novel strategy of manufacturing PET SIVG. The key aspect of this work is the significant increase in the surface temperature and the conductivity of PET SIVG compared with other polymer-based SIVGs, highlighting its novelty and importance.