Amorphous High-Entropy Hydroxides of Tunable Wide Solar Absorption for Solar Water Evaporation

The high-entropy materials have raised much attention in recent years due to their extraordinary performances in mechanical, catalysis, energy storage fields. Herein, a new type of high-entropy hydroxides (e.g., NiFeCoMnAl(OH)_x) that are amorphous and capable of broad solar absorption is reported. A facile one-pot co-precipitation method is employed to synthesize these amorphous high-entropy hydroxides (a-HEHOs) under ambient conditions. The a-HEHOs thus obtained display widely tunable bandgap (e.g., from 2.6 to 1.1 eV) due to their high-entropy and amorphous characteristics, enabling efficient light absorbance and photothermal conversion in the solar regime. Further solar water evaporation measurements show that the a-HEHOs delivered a considerable energy conversion efficiency of 55%, comparable to black titanium oxides that are synthesized using more complex and expensive methods.