Extreme water stress is expected by 2050, affecting almost 40% of the population, with a fourfold demand increase in the manufacturing sector and onefold in domestic usage by 2050 [[1], [2], [3]]. Water covers nearly two-thirds of our earth; however, fresh water resources are limited to only ~3% of the global water presence [4]. So, alternative resources like seawater and wastewater should be used to obtain adequate quality freshwater [5]. Conventional reclamation and reuse processes are centralized in nature and have a higher footprint and energy consumption [6]. Methods like membrane distillation and solar-driven evaporation involve a phase change process, i.e., evaporation, to separate pure water and are able to produce high-quality pure water with pollutants as low as two ppm in output [[7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16]]. 4 Further improvements have been observed using innovative self-heating membranes for distillation and solar-driven interfacial evaporation [[17], [18], [19], [20]].

The solar-induced evaporation is a highly-efficient, renewable, affordable, non-contaminating, passive, and zero CO2 emission technology. Solar-driven evaporation(SDE) promises a purified water source for rural and urban communities for decentralized/centralized needs [[21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28]]. SDE can be observed by heating bulk water with high thermal inertia or by heating only a thin layer of water at the water-air interface, which has negligible thermal inertia and thus responds very quickly [[29], [30], [31], [32]]. Heating of water-air interface using thin film is known as Interfacial Evaporation (IE) and is efficient compared to the bulk process. Ghasemi et al., 2014 proposed the first Interfacial evaporation concept in a double-layer structure made with graphite flakes and carbon foam [30]. New interfacial evaporation devices have been used for applications like desalination [[33], [34], [35]], sterilization and steam generation [36], wastewater treatment [37,38], fuel generation [39,40], and energy generation [[40], [41], [42], [43], [44]].

Interfacial solar-driven evaporation (ISDE) devices incorporate four main components: an absorber, water channel, air-water interface, and substrate. The primary research focus in ISDE is the efficient engineering of these four components to give superior efficiency [22,27]. The theoretical water production flux, i.e., around 1.4 l m−2 h−1 under one sun, is a critical bottleneck in ISDE [45]. Although much progress has been marked in materials and designs, IE still suffers from fouling, inefficient water transport, and salt deposition [[46], [47], [48], [49], [50]]. In seawater, salt accumulation and crystallization can happen on the absorber surface and in the water channels [51,52]. This salt deposition on the evaporator surface reduces efficiency [53,54]. Interfacial evaporation devices can also be used as brine management devices to deal with the brine generated during desalination [27,51,[55], [56], [57]]. Cheng et al., 2020 have shown an evaporation rate(ER) of 1.35 kg m−2 h−1 using 26.6 wt% saturated salt solution through his ISDE device [57]. The device has also demonstrated an efficiency of 92% at lower solar radiation of 0.25 sun.

Recent research focuses on improving the steam generation from the absorber, but pure water production also depends on condenser performance, so device design becomes necessary for better desalination performance. There are various review articles published, but they are majorly limited to the reviews of materials used in photothermal conversion [23,25,53,[58], [59], [60], [61], [62], [63], [64], [65], [66]]. Other reviews have discussed the challenges and opportunities of IE for a variety of environmental applications [22,67,68]. However, as far as the author's knowledge, there are no reviews specifically focused on evaporation-based desalination devices and their designs, so such an article is urgently needed. Devices that can perform desalination efficiently under variable natural solar radiation and feed quality are the need of the hour. This study critically reviewed and summarized the development aspects of ISDE devices with new concepts and engineering for enhancing performance. The first section of this paper described strategies to improve evaporation efficiency by improving the core parts of ISDE: absorber, interfaces, water channel, and insulation. Followed by strategies, recent design trends in the ISDE device configurations have been presented to extend the performance. The subsequent sections analyzed desalination application-based water production devices, including condensers and other required components. Further, the review points out the shortcomings of existing ISDE devices and their applicability in real-world scenarios. Finally, the article provides the challenges and future prospects for the development of effective interfacial evaporators.