Font Size: 

The lack of freshwater is one of the most serious problems for human beings in the 21st century.In order to generate fresh water from sea water and brackish water, variousdesalination methods have been researched and widely applied for waterdesalination such as distillation, electrodialysis, reverse osmosis, activatedcarbon adsorption, ion exchange method, etc. Capacitive deionization (CDI)technology is becoming increasly attractive as an alternative desalinationmethod due to low energy consumption, highwater recovery rate, easy operation with no secondary pollution and therenewable characteristic of the electrode. [1-2] Theprinciple is illustrated in Scheme 1. The high capacitiveand high conductive electrode materials in CDI setup are needed in order toenhance the accumulation of ions and decrease energy consumption. Electrospuntechnique is very suitable for carbon nanofiber material fabrication with highspecific surface area and conductivity. By adjusting the composition of thepolymer solution, the fibers with different structure and morphology can beobtained. In this paper, the self-sustainable meso/micro-porous carbon fiberswere fabricated by mixing different additives such as inorganic salts (ZnCl2,ZnAc) or amorphous polymers PMMA in the polyacrylonitrile solution aspore-forming components, followed by carbonization. The pore size and densitycan be tuned by adjusting the ratio of the additives. Cyclic voltammetry experimentconfirmed that the specific capacitiance of the carbon fiber has a significantincrease compared with the pure PAN drived carbon fiber. The capacitivedesalination performance has a great improvement with the salt removal amount 5times higher than pure PAN based fiber. It demonstrates that the mesoporouscarbon fiber electrode based supercapacitor is potential for water softing andbrackish water desalination application.

electrospun fiber