Turning Thermocol Waste into a Highly Efficient Carbon Composite as an Interfacial Solar Thermal Evaporator

Solar thermal interfacial evaporation is a cutting-edge method that has been recently developed to produce fresh water using sunlight. Herein, an incredibly robust, cost-effective and highly durable polystyrene-activated carbon-polyurethane foam (PSC) composite fabricated as an efficient solar thermal evaporator (STE). It offers a high evaporation rate of 1.70 kg m^− 2 h^− 1 with excellent photothermal efficiency under one sun illumination (1 kW m^− 2). Due to its porous nature, PSC-STE has excellent dye water, salt water, and highly dense muddy water filtering ability, confirmed using UV-visible spectroscopy. A 0.16 m² solar still was constructed to show the device’s performance under natural solar irradiation conditions. With natural solar irradiation of less than 0.8 kW m^− 2, the solar still generates approximately 280–340 ml of fresh water within 6–7 h a day. Moreover, the device shows excellent purification properties of highly contaminated water of 710 ppm to 12 ppm. As a result, the non-decomposable waste polystyrene, converted into this valuable, cost-effective, and highly stable PSC solar-driven evaporator, can be employed as a long-term approach for highly clean water production.