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Solar-driven efficient and selective ammonia recovery from ammonium-containing wastewater

Nature Sustainability volume 8, pages 1058–1067 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Recovering ammonia (NH3) from ammonium (NH4+)-containing wastewater simultaneously achieves resource recovery and wastewater treatment. Given that NH3 recovery involves a reversible NH4+ hydrolysis reaction, traditional strategy requires alkaline reactants for promoting the reaction forward and energy-intensive heating for recovering NH3, resulting in substantial cost and energy consumption. Here we propose a solar-driven NH3 recovery strategy enabled by floatable amino-grafted (‒NH2) MXene (Ti3C2)-based sponge that possesses local alkaline environment and interfacial heat on water surface. Both H+ trapping via ‒NH2 groups and NH3 evaporating via interfacial solar heating thermodynamically facilitate efficient and sustainable NH3 recovery. Taking ammonia chloride (NH4Cl) wastewater for example, a NH3 recovery rate of 0.6 mol m−2 h−1 with a purity of 99.8% is obtained under 5 sun without extra reagents and energy consumption, and the recovered NH3 can be directly used as nitrogen fertilizer. Besides, the amino-grafted MXene-based sponge is also capable of being fully regenerated to its initial performance under 15 sun, and hydrochloric acid, a valuable by-product, can be obtained during this process. Life-cycle and techno-economic assessments highlight the advantages of solar-driven NH3 recovery in terms of environmental benefits and economic potential.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of traditional NH3 recovery and the designed solar-driven NH3 recovery.
Fig. 2: Preparation and characterization of AMS.
Fig. 3: Performance of solar-driven NH3 recovery and the separation mechanism.
Fig. 4: Outdoor practical applications of the AMS.
Fig. 5: Life-cycle and global potential analysis.

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All data are available in this article and its Supplementary Information. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work is jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 52322211 to N.X., 52525202 to J.Z., 92262305 to J.Z., 52302225 to X.W. and 52202251 to H.Z.), National Key R&D Program of China (grant nos. 2024YFF0506000 to J.Z. and 2022YFB3804902 to N.X.), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. 20250107 to N.X.), GeoX’ Interdisciplinary Project of Frontiers Science Center for Critical Earth Material Cycling (grant no. 20250107 to N.X.), Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of CPSF (grant no. 2022M721556 to Q.Z.) and Jiangsu Funding Program for Excellent Postdoctoral Talent (grant nos. 2023ZB416 to Q.Z. and 2023ZB732 to N.C.). This work is also supported by the New Cornerstone Science Foundation through the XPLORER PRIZE, Nanjing U35 Basic Strengthening Program. We acknowledge the microfabrication center at the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures (NLSSM) for technical support.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Qi Zhang, Tianqi Wei, Minfei Fei.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Frontiers Science Center for Critical Earth Material Cycling, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China

    Qi Zhang, Tianqi Wei, Minfei Fei, Xiaojun Wang, Ningning Cao, Haowen Chi, Hongzhi Zheng, Ning Xu & Jia Zhu

  2. School of Sustainable Energy and Resources, Nanjing University, Suzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaojun Wang & Jia Zhu

  3. Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Huzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Huzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Xueyang Zhao

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Contributions

J.Z., N.X. and Q.Z. conceived of and designed the project. Q.Z., X.W., H.Z. and X.Z. performed the material preparation and characterizations. Q.Z. and T.W. contributed to the recovery experiments. T.W., M.F., N.C. and H.C. performed the calculations. Q.Z., T.W., M.F., N.X. and J.Z. wrote the paper. All the authors discussed the results and commented on the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ning Xu or Jia Zhu.

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Zhang, Q., Wei, T., Fei, M. et al. Solar-driven efficient and selective ammonia recovery from ammonium-containing wastewater. Nat Sustain 8, 1058–1067 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01609-6

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