A new material synthesized by an international research team may be of nanoscale proportions, but it effectively accelerates the evaporation of seawater for the production of clean drinking water.

A laser ablation technique was used to produce amorphous titanium dioxide nanospheres doped with gold nanoclusters. Laser ablation in liquids represents a simple and environmentally friendly technology for nanomaterial preparation that can be carried out under normal environmental conditions without external 3D model of a gold-doped titanium dioxide nanosphere. Source: S.O. Gurbatov et alstimuli.

The fabricated material demonstrated impressive broadband light-absorbing properties in the visible and near-infrared spectral ranges and functioned as a kind of nano-heater in a laboratory-scale desalination tank. The excellent light-absorbing and plasmonic properties of the nanomaterials were demonstrated to improve the efficiency of a solar steam generator by increasing the water evaporation rate 2.5 times compared with that for pristine distilled water.

These titanium dioxide nanospheres might also find future use in microfluidic biomedical systems, lab-on-chip devices, and environmental monitoring of pollutants, antibiotics or viruses in water.

A paper on the research conducted by scientists from Far Eastern Federal University (Russia), nanoGUNE Cooperative Research Center (Spain), ITMO University (Russia), University of Mining and Geology (Bulgaria), Tokai University (Japan) and B. I. Stepanov Institute of Physics (Belarus)is published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.