Recent progress on high-performance ceramics for solar-driven interfacial evaporation: from forefront to application

Seawater desalination serves as an essential approach to alleviating global freshwater shortage problem. In recent years, solar-driven interfacial evaporation (SDIE) has emerged as a promising roadmap owing to its precise heat localization capability. However, practical applications urge high mechanical robustness, corrosion resistance, and thermal stability. Conventional materials fail to meet these requirements, severely limiting the long-term stable operation of SDIE. With superior environmental stability and structural designability, ceramic materials offer a key solution to these challenges. Currently, significant efforts have been devoted to developing ceramic-based SDIE, demonstrating the great potential of ceramics in desalination. This review systematically summarizes recent advances in high-performance ceramics from two main aspects: porous substrates and photothermal functional layers. By discussing the design of ceramic substrates, comprehensive influence of porous structures on evaporation performance under practical conditions is investigated. Emphasis is placed on the enhancement mechanisms of electronic structure regulation and morphology engineering within the photothermal layer. Furthermore, our present review establishes a guiding role of multiscale simulations in screening suitable bandgap materials, reducing evaporation enthalpy, and optimizing water-salt transport. We also propose viable optimization strategies to address the issue of insufficient long-term stability, accelerating the transition of SDIE from laboratory-scale research towards practical implementation.