Point-to-face assembled carbon architecture targeting photothermal and electrothermal synergetic conversion and management for efficient cleanup of crude-oil spills

Porous materials capable of efficiently remediating crude oil spills are needed for resource and environmental sustainability. However, a big challenging is to achieve high adsorption capacity and speed owing to high viscosity and sluggish flowability of crude oils. We here report a novel hierarchical carbon architecture featuring zero-dimentional carbon dots assembled on reduced graphene oxide nanosheets upon commercial sponge. It exhibits extraordinary sorption capacity of 97.4 g/g and provides a highly modular photothermal and electro-thermal conversion platform for rapidly heating crude oils with the minimum heat losses, enabling efficient adsorption of crude oils. Thanks to its excellent energy management ability, the energy efficiency for solar to crude oil adsorption reaches to 248 % with the aid of proper input voltage. Besides, the crude oil value recycled in one hour is 3.15 similar to 4.43 times than the cost of materials. Therefore, this work offers a new material architecting system for addressing catastrophic large-area spills of crude oils.