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Water scarcity has become a global challenge attributed to climate change, deforestation, population growth, and increasing water demand. While advanced water production plants are prevalent in urban areas, remote islands and sparsely populated regions face significant obstacles in establishing such technologies. Consequently, there is an urgent need for efficient, affordable, and sustainable water production technologies in these areas. Herein, we present a facile approach utilizing an ultrashort-pulsed laser to directly convert cotton fabric into graphene under ambient conditions. The resulting laser-induced graphene (LIG) demonstrates the highest light absorption efficiency of 99.0% and a broad absorption range (250-2500 nm). As an excellent solar absorber, LIG on cotton fabric can efficiently absorb 98.6% of the total solar irradiance and its surface temperature can reach 84.5 °C under sunlight without optical concentration. Moreover, we propose a cost-effective 3D LIG evaporator (LIGE) for continuous solar-powered desalination. This innovative design effectively mitigates salt formation issues and enhances the steam generation efficiency. The water evaporation rate and the solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency are measured to be around 1.709 kg m -2 h -1 and 95.1%, respectively, which surpass those reported in previous studies. The simplicity, durability, and continuous operational capability of the 3D LIGE offer promising prospects to address the growing challenges in global water scarcity.

Personal wearable devices are considered important in advanced healthcare, military, and sports applications. Among them, e-textiles are the best candidates because of their intrinsic conformability without any additional device installation. However, e-textile manufacturing to date has a high process complexity and low design flexibility. Here, we report the direct laser writing of e-textiles by converting raw Kevlar textiles to electrically conductive laser-induced graphene (LIG) via femtosecond laser pulses in ambient air. The resulting LIG has high electrical conductivity and chemical reliability with a low sheet resistance of 2.86 Ω/□. Wearable multimodal e-textile sensors and supercapacitors are realized on different types of Kevlar textiles, including nonwoven, knit, and woven structures, by considering their structural textile characteristics. The nonwoven textile exhibits high mechanical stability, making it suitable for applications in temperature sensors and micro-supercapacitors. On the other hand, the knit textile possesses inherent spring-like stretchability, enabling its use in the fabrication of strain sensors for human motion detection. Additionally, the woven textile offers special sensitive pressure-sensing networks between the warp and weft parts, making it suitable for the fabrication of bending sensors used in detecting human voices. This direct laser synthesis of arbitrarily patterned LIGs from various textile structures could result in the facile realization of wearable electronic sensors and energy storage.

A synthetic platform for industrially applicable two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors that addresses the paramount issues associated with large-scale production, wide-range photosensitive materials, and oxidative stability has not yet been developed. In this study, we attained the 6 in. scale production of 2D SnSe semiconductors with spatial homogeneity using a rational synthetic platform based on the thermal decomposition of solution-processed single-source precursors. The long-range structural and chemical homogeneities of the 2D SnSe layers are manifested using comprehensive spectroscopic analyses. Furthermore, the capability of the SnSe-based photodetectors for broadband photodetection is distinctly verified. The photoresponsivity and detectivity of the SnSe-based photodetectors are 5.89 A W -1 and 1.8 × 10 11 Jones at 532 nm, 1.2 A W -1 and 3.7 × 10 10 Jones at 1064 nm, and 0.14 A W -1 and 4.3 × 10 9 Jones at 1550 nm, respectively. The minimum rise times for the 532 and 1064 nm lasers are 62 and 374 μs, respectively. The photoelectrical analysis of the 5 × 5 SnSe-based photodetector array reveals 100% active devices with 95.06% photocurrent uniformity. We unequivocally validated that the air and thermal stabilities of the photocurrent yielded from the SnSe-based photodetector are determined to be >30 d in air and 160 °C, respectively, which are suitable for optoelectronic applications.