Strategies for continuous freshwater harvesting of solar-driven interfacial evaporation: A review

Solar-driven interfacial evaporation offers an efficient and sustainable approach for water desalination and related applications through effective photothermal conversion and simple, low-carbon, and off-grid operation. Despite significant progress in enhancing evaporation performance and energy efficiency, solar-driven interfacial evaporation system remains constrained by their dependence on solar irradiance, which limits their operation under cloudy or nighttime conditions. To address this challenge, emerging strategies such as integrating phase-change materials, coupling with auxiliary energy inputs, and enhancing environmental heat utilization, have been developed to enable continuous, all-weather evaporation. To provide a comprehensive comparison of these approaches and an overview of recent technological and theoretical advances, this work highlights the latest developments in continuous solar-driven interfacial evaporation systems, critically evaluates their performance and limitations, and discusses key challenges and future prospects. By outlining material design principles and system-level strategies, it offers valuable insights for advancing solar-driven interfacial evaporation toward scalable, reliable, and sustainable freshwater generation.