Application of wooden arrays in solar water evaporation and desalination

Interfacial evaporation is one of the most promising technologies for harvesting solar energy to generate steam. Here, we report a solar interfacial evaporator with excellent self-cleaning property via a well-designed artificial channel array in the raw wood substrate. This device shows high light absorption nearly 90% and high solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency of ~88.2% of pure water under one sun irradiation. In addition, due to the existence of two different channels on the device surface: man-made millimetre-sized cutting channels and micro-channels formed by natural growth, the deposition of salt was reduced and its long-term stability in the NaCl solution (over 80 h of continuous operation) was increased. Based on the above conditions, the PCW-7 × 7 still maintains its efficiency at about 80.0% and 73.4% at 1 kW m -2 irradiation in the different simulated seawater with different salinities (3.5 and 20 wt%).