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Rational and sustainable utilization of resources is critical for the continuous development of this society. Solar energy, as one of the renewables, shows great potential in replacing part of the traditional energy supplies since it is clean, abundant, and easily convertible to thermal, electrical, and biological energies. Using solar energy as the green driving force, interfacial solar evaporation is a promising way for clean water production to alleviate global water shortage, taking advantage of its high evaporation efficiency (more than 80%) and strong adaptability toward various water sources and fields. In recent years, various kinds of materials with diverse designs have been synthesized and applied in interfacial solar evaporation for clean water production. Herein, recent progress in interfacial solar evaporators for clean water production is systematically reviewed, based on the photothermal conversion mechanisms of solar absorbers, including carbonous, semiconductor‐based, and plasmatic ones. Furthermore, key design factors and strategies in interfacial solar evaporators are reviewed and discussed from material and structural design point of view, such as water transport, thermal management, latent heat for water vaporization, and salt accumulation. Finally, some perspectives related to resolving existing problems in the field are given.

Asphaltenes from bitumen are abundant resource to be transformed into carbon as promising supercapacitor electrodes, while there is a lack of understanding the impact from different fractions of bitumen and asphaltenes, as well as the presence of transition metals. Here, nanoporous carbon was synthesized from bitumen, hexane-insoluble asphaltenes and N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF)-fractionated asphaltenes by using Mg(OH)2 nanoplates as the template with in-situ KOH activation, and used as an supercapacitor electrode material. All of the carbon exhibited large surface area (1500–2200 m2 g−1) with a distribution of micro and mesopores except for that derived from the DMF-soluble asphaltenes. The pyrolysis of asphaltenes resulted in the formation of nickel oxide/carbon composite (NiO/C), which demonstrated high capacitance of 380 F g−1 at 1 A g−1 discharge current resulting from the pseudocapacitance of NiO and the electrochemical double layer capacitance of the carbon. The NiO/C composite obtained from the DMF-insoluble portion had low NiO content which led to lower capacitance. Meanwhile, the specific capacitance of NiO/C composite from the DMF-soluble part was lower than the unfractionated asphaltene due to the higher NiO content resulting in lower conductivity. Therefore asphaltenes derived from nickel-rich crude bitumen is suitable for the synthesis of nanoporous NiO/C composite material with high capacitance.