Surface water evaporators mimicking river transport: Bridging water-energy conflict for crystallization-free...

Solar interfacial evaporation (SIE) represents a promising solution for sustainable freshwater generation, yet it faces a fundamental challenge in balancing heat localization and salt rejection rooted in inherent water-energy conflicts. Inspired by the evaporation of terrestrial surface water, we present a biomimetic surface water evaporator engineered with an asymmetric hydrophilic (ZnO-CuS)/hydrophobic (carbon cloth) heterointerface, achieving concurrent optimization of water transport, thermal confinement, and salt discharge. This architecture constructs a confined water layer channel (20∼60 μm) on the hydrophobic surface to mimic river-inspired transport, which not only concentrates evaporation at the gas-liquid interface, achieving 92.05 % solar-to-vapor efficiency and an evaporation rate of 2.82 kg m^-2 h^-1 under 1 sun by minimizing parasitic heat dissipation, but also enables crystallization-free operation in hypersaline brine (20 wt% NaCl) over 8 h via unidirectional flow-driven solute expulsion. Crucially, the ZnO-CuS nano-heterostructure can realize the synergistic degradation of organic pollutants through the in-situ redox reaction, realizing the first holistic integration of "water-energy-salt-pollutant" linkage management on a single platform, and provides an innovative paradigm for the sustainable purification of complex water bodies.