Bionic Engineered Structures for Advanced Solar‐Driven Interfacial Evaporation Desalination: Current Research Advances and Future Challenges

ABSTRACT Solar‐powered interfacial evaporation (SIE) has emerged as a promising tactic for tackling global water scarcity by utilizing solar‐thermal conversion and evaporation at the air/material/water interface. But there are still certain problems with solid salt accumulation and poor energy utilization. In order to address these obstacles and further ameliorate the performance of SIEs, inspiration can be drawn from biological structures in nature. These systems, integrated with biomimetic designs, exhibited significantly improved evaporation performance, making them a promising pathway for developing state‐of‐the‐art seawater desalination technology. This review provides a systematic overview of the design principles and research progress of solar evaporators inspired by nature. The SIE systems, which incorporate biomimetic structures such as roots, leaves, flowers, trunks, branches, trees, mushrooms, animal feathers, shells, and insect nests, not only promote solar energy absorption but also facilitate internal water transport, thereby achieving excellent evaporation rates and prominent energy conversion efficiency. Notably, the SIE systems inspired by trees and animal behaviors demonstrate significantly improved salt tolerance. Most significantly, the promising perspectives of solar vapor generation for metal ions extraction, multiple energy harvesting‐conversion, photothermal anti‐icing/deicing, and photocatalysis degradation‐decomposition are also highlighted. Finally, the challenges and issues related to the development of bionic SIEs are further discussed.