This innovative evaporator integrates thermal insulation and self-flotation, suggesting potential in sustainable freshwater extraction.
Solar‐powered photothermal evaporators offer a sustainable approach for freshwater extraction. Nevertheless, their practical application is hindered by the difficulties in integrating thermal insulation, self‐flotation, and efficient water transport within a single device. Inspired by the structure of Victoria Amazonica , a fiber‐based solar steam evaporator is developed, featuring self‐floating, self‐insulating, and unidirectional water‐transfer. The design employs a Janus nonwoven (JN), fabricated by precisely adjusting the weight ratio of a hydrophilic viscose (VIS) fiber web and a hydrophobic polypropylene/polyethylene (PP/PE) core‐sheath fiber web, followed by a needle punching process to bond them together. The resulting high fluffiness and vertically aligned fiber pillars form continuous water channels across the JN thickness. This structure enables ultralow thermal conductivity (< 0.05 W mK −1 ), minimal conductive heat loss (0.6%), sustained water supply, and rapid salt ion diffusion, leading to a high photothermal conversion efficiency of 90.8%. More attractively, the evaporator maintains permanent buoyancy on seawater, since its density (1.06 g cm − 3 ) is even lower than that of seawater (1.07 g cm − 3 ). By integrating biomimetic structural engineering with scalable and affordable fabrication, this work may provide a competitive pathway to tackling global freshwater scarcity while enhancing the design of high‐performance solar desalination systems.
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Yu et al. (2025) studied this question.
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