Solar interfacial evaporation, featuring no extra energy need and low equipment demand, offers a promising off-grid desalination solution to alleviate global freshwater shortage. However, solar evaporators typically rely on internal pores for water transport that impedes vapor escape. In this work, exploiting a two-phase structure and directional arrangement of bamboo, a bamboo fiber aggregation (BFA)-based broom-like solar evaporator with open fibrous gaps for water transport and vapor diffusion is developed. The polypyrrole-coated BFA (PPy-BFA) evaporator exhibits a water evaporation rate of 3.3 kg m−2 h−1 with an efficiency of 146.7% under 1 sun. This value is 2.6 times higher than that of PPy-coated natural bamboo and superior to most of the previously reported bamboo-based evaporators. These low-tortuosity fiber gaps enable rapid water transport while providing extensive air–liquid interfaces that effectively promote vapor diffusion and harness heat from the environment. Open-channel configuration has a lower surface temperature and more uniform vapor distribution than that of the internal-channel one, preventing the formation of high-humidity zones. Moreover, PPy-BFA also demonstrates excellent salt tolerance performance, maintaining a stable evaporation rate of 2.3 kg m−2 h−1 for 20% NaCl solution. This work offers important insights into the configuration design of solar evaporators and provides a low-cost choice for off-grid desalination.
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