Multi-arterial hydraulic textile evaporator enabling uninterrupted solar-driven desalination

Solar photothermal interfacial evaporation is an effective way to realize seawater desalination; however, conventional solar evaporators still suffer from weaknesses such as poor water transfer and surface salt deposition during freshwater acquisition. To address the above challenges, this work develops a solar evaporator based on a segmented water transport channel using polypyrone (PPy) and fabric to fabricate an interfacial evaporator with excellent photothermal conversion and water transport property. Significantly, the PPy/fabric evaporator reach as high as 1.67 kg m -2 h −1 evaporation rate under 1 sun intensity (3.5 wt% NaCl solution). Especially, at high brine concentrations (10 wt% NaCl solution), the evaporator maintains up to 1.63 kg m -2 h −1 evaporation rates and no significant salt crystallization on the evaporator surface. This work provides a novel design idea for constructing a fabric-based evaporator with multi-channel water supply for continuous solar desalination.