Cellulose-based Interfacial Solar Evaporators: Structural Regulation and Performance Manipulation

The shortage of freshwater resources has become a major obstacle threatening human development, and directly utilizing solar energy by solar evaporators is emerging as a promising method to produce freshwater from the seawater. Compared to many synthetic polymer-based evaporators, cellulose-based evaporators are expected to offer more interesting features benefiting from the renewable feature and abundant reserves of cellulose-contained naturally occurring materials. First, according to the different fabrication methods, cellulose-based solar evaporators can be divided into two types, i.e., top-down utilization (wood-based) and bottom-up assembled (cellulose composite-based), respectively. The different fabrication schemes also bring their own unique advantages, such as the bimodal porous structure of wood-based evaporators and the artificial interconnection microporous network of cellulose composite-based evaporators. Subsequently, this review further summarizes the most recent advances and highlights of those cellulose-based solar evaporators, by focusing on their structural regulation strategies (e.g., drilled channel array, asymmetric wettability structure, delignification, 2D waterway, etc.) and evaporation performance improvements (e.g., salt resistance, high evaporation rate, etc.). Finally, the challenges in this field and potential solutions are also discussed, which are anticipated to provide new opportunities toward the future development of cellulose and other kinds of biomass-based evaporators.