Synthesis And Photothermal Properties Of Zinc Antimonide Nanoparticles

In recent years,people pay more attention to the development of desalination technology because of the increasing shortage of fresh water resources.At present,steam compression method,reverse osmosis membrane method,electrodialysis method,ion exchange method and freezing method are widely used.However,these methods require a large amount of conventional energy,which also leads to energy shortage and pollution.Therefore,the environment-friendly and sustainable technology of solar desalination has received extensive attention.Nonetheless,solar desalination technology cannot be industrialized and has not been widely used hindered by low photothermal conversion efficiency and other factors.In order to weaken the impact of fresh water resources shortage for human life,researchers are trying to find a suitable material which possess high energy conversion efficiency to make the solar desalination technology mature enough to get a lot of fresh water easily.In nanomaterials science,zinc antimonide nanomaterial is a kind of narrow band gap semiconductor material with good performance in various fields.Due to its advantages such as low synthesis cost,good stabilities,low biotoxicity,good morphology and structural controllability,the zinc antimonide nanomaterial has also attracted wide attention from researchers.According to the published literature,zinc antimonide has excellent thermoelectric properties,but its photothermal properties have not been thoroughly studied.Therefore,Zn₄Sb₃ and ZnSb with nanostructures were synthesized by using solvothermal method and controlling experimental parameters such as the ratio of chemical materials,temperature and time of reaction in the experiment.The corresponding characterizations of different nanoparticles indicate that highly purified Zn₄Sb₃ and ZnSb nanoparticles have been obtained in the experiment,whose particle size is about 70-150 nm.Then,the related photothermal properties were studied and tested respectively,showing that the optical absorption of the Zn₄Sb₃ reached 0.359 and its photothermal conversion efficiency was 32.90%while the optical absorption of the ZnSb reached 0.607 and its photothermal conversion efficiency was 22.05%.Besides,both of them have good photothermal stability.Based on these results,we coated the nanoparticles evenly on the nylon membrane,forming a thin,dense membrane.Floating the membrane on the surface of deionized water and simulating the vertical irradiation of sunlight with an intensity of 1 kW/m² on the membrane,the results showed that the Zn₄Sb₃ membrane’s solar-thermal conversion efficiency was as high as 88.39%while the ZnSb membrane’s solar-thermal conversion efficiency can reach 90.67%,and both of them have good solar-thermal stability.According to the experimental results,both nanoparticles have good optical absorption performance,photothermal conversion efficiency and photothermal stability,and the photothermal performance of ZnSb is slightly better than that of Zn₄Sb₃.In this paper,the synthesis method,photothermal properties and related mechanisms of different crystalline phases zinc antimonide nanoparticles were deeply researched which laid a solid foundation for the industrialization of zinc antimonide nanoparticles synthesis and the applications in various fields.