Solar-driven interfacial evaporation: Design and application progress of structural evaporators and functional distillers

Solar-driven interfacial evaporation technology (TSDIE), which directly uses solar energy to evaporate and purify water, is an emerging solution to address the shortage of freshwater resources and the energy crisis. Thanks to the recent innovative designs of functional evaporators and distillers with various unique considerations in kinetics and thermodynamics, TSDIE has achieved evaporation rates of up to 5.9 kg m⁻² h⁻¹ (>98% energy efficiency under 1 sun irradiation) and a freshwater collection of approximately 34 L m⁻² day⁻¹. It would be valuable to further discuss and summarize the synergistic modulation and coupling mechanisms of materials, components and devices around specific structural evaporators, as well as recent advances and future dynamics of their interaction with multidisciplinary subjects. This review thus aims to summarize and orient structural evaporators in more detail from the spatial dimension and deformation perspective and to systematically discuss and summarize the coupling roles between light capture, water transport and energy management for different types of structural evaporators. The rationalized structure design of the mainstream evaporator that needs to meet high efficiency desalination and the distiller that can effectively realize freshwater collection is then analysed. Subsequently, the scale-up, long-term stability and their emerging coupling applications of interfacial solar-driven structure evaporators (ISSEs) are discussed. Finally, the salient challenges that need to be addressed in designing structural evaporators and distillers to overcome the global water-energy crisis are highlighted.