Solar‐Driven Interfacial Evaporation and Self‐Powered Water Wave Detection Based on an All‐Cellulose Monolithic Design

Global water scarcity assessment at a high spatial and temporal resolution, accounting for environmental flow requirements.

The future adequacy of freshwater resources is difficult to assess, owing to a complex and rapidly changing geography of water supply and use. Numerical experiments combining climate model outputs, water budgets, and socioeconomic information along digitized river networks demonstrate that (i) a large proportion of the world's population is currently experiencing water stress and (ii) rising water demands greatly outweigh greenhouse warming in defining the state of global water systems to 2025. Consideration of direct human impacts on global water supply remains a poorly articulated but potentially important facet of the larger global change question.

This comprehensive review provides a guide to design photothermal materials and systems for solar-driven water evaporation addressing the water–energy nexus. Photothermal materials with broad solar absorption and high conversion efficiency have recently attracted significant interest. They are becoming a fast-growing research focus in the area of solar-driven vaporization for clean water production. The parallel development of thermal management strategies through both material and system designs has further improved the overall efficiency of solar vaporization. Collectively, this green solar-driven water vaporization technology has regained attention as a sustainable solution for water scarcity. In this review, we will report the recent progress in solar absorber material design based on various photothermal conversion mechanisms, evaluate the prerequisites in terms of optical, thermal and wetting properties for efficient solar-driven water vaporization, classify the systems based on different photothermal evaporation configurations and discuss other correlated applications in the areas of desalination, water purification and energy generation. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review on the current development in efficient photothermal evaporation, and suggest directions to further enhance its overall efficiency through the judicious choice of materials and system designs, while synchronously capitalizing waste energy to realize concurrent clean water and energy production.