Published Paper Details:

Water is the most precious resource responsible for life on our planet. More than 1 billion people do not have access to a source of clean drinking water, and around 3 billion experience water scarcity at least a month per year. The ocean makes up 70 percent of the earth�s surface and accounts for about 96 percent of the water on the planet. Desalination of the seawater resource has emerged as a promising technology to meet the current fresh water demands. At present solar energy is used widely for desalination and new and new renewable energy technologies are developed to meet the ever increasing demands for potable water. In floating absorber based solar steam generation, the infrared rays from sun are converted into heat energy and this energy is used to convert water into steam. Cotton can be used as a floating absorber due to its high capillarity, low thermal conductivity and porosity. Even though cotton has its advantages, it has a very high reflectivity of incident light and reflects about 60% of incoming radiations. Study on the evaporation performance of Graphene Oxide (GO) cotton absorber and uncoated cotton absorber shows GO coated cotton is 2.38 times better than uncoated cotton absorber. GO has high photothermal efficiency which converts almost 60% of incoming sunlight into heat energy. Polystyrene form used as a support helps in low heat transmission loss thereby localizing heat on top surface. The evaporation rate obtained in our study using GO coated cotton shows promising result comparable to other materials used as floating absorber in different studies. Water quality analysis conducted on the condensed water samples suggests the obtained purified water is potable.