Architected 3D‐Printed, Solar‐Powered Interfacial Evaporators: A New Era in Desalination

The increasing demand for clean water intensified research into solar desalination as a sustainable and energy‐efficient approach for freshwater production. Recent developments in the field of 3D printing provide new opportunities to overcome the limitations of conventional solar evaporator designs by enabling the fabrication of tailored, multifunctional structures. While traditional solar stills typically produce 2–5 l/m ² /day of fresh water, 3D‐printed interfacial heating systems demonstrated significantly enhanced performance, achieving up to 4.36 kg/m ² h under one‐sun illumination. The review emphasizes the role of additive manufacturing in designing photothermal materials, usage of innovative solar evaporators such as Janus evaporators, volcanic evaporators, tripodal porous wood‐mimetic evaporator, palisade solar evaporator, chiral torsion, and hierarchical porous and optimizing evaporator geometries. This review also highlights the salt‐repellent and self‐cleaning features of the evaporators to enhance evaporation efficiency and long‐term stability. Furthermore, key challenges, like material durability, print resolution, scalability, and long‐term reliability, are critically discussed, along with potential solutions through high‐performance polymers, nanocomposites, and emerging 4D printing strategies. The review concludes that additive manufacturing not only provides design flexibility and rapid prototyping but also has the potential to speed up the development of scalable and robust solar desalination technologies that can tackle global water scarcity.