Evaporation-Driven Fabric for Synergistic Water-Electricity-Lithium Co-Production

Water evaporation constitutes a ubiquitous physical phenomenon. This natural process enables efficient energy and resource harvesting through water interacting with materials with tailored structural, chemical, and thermal properties. Here, this work designs an evaporation-driven fabric (e-fabric) that enables the utilization of water-electricity-lithium from brine through three optimized functional layers. Interfacial charge asymmetry between the carbon black (CB) photothermal layer and Al₂O₃ thermal insulation layer drives directional ion transport, generating sustained hydrovoltaic output with ≈7.7 µA cm^-2 current density. Under 1 kW m^-2 sun irradiation, e-fabric demonstrates 1.42 kg m^-2 h^-1 evaporation rate in brine while the Al₂O₃ layer reduces thermal dissipation. The middle protonated lithium titanate (HTO) adsorption layer selectively captures Li⁺ which achieves an adsorption capacity of 40.87 mg m^-2 during a 2-h adsorption cycle while maintaining 93.2% recovery efficiency over 8 cycles. The decoupled operation of the adsorption process from the evaporation power generation system effectively prevents ion accumulation from affecting performance. This work can provide an approach for evaporation-driven water-electricity-lithium co-production systems.