  In last decades, solar stills, as one of the solar desalination technologies,
have been well studied in terms of their productivity, efficiency and
economics. Recently, to overcome the bottleneck of traditional solar still,
improving solar still by optimizing the solar evaporation process based on
micro/nanomaterials have been proposed as a promising strategy. In this review,
the recent development for achieving high-performance of solar still and solar
evaporation are discussed, including materials as well as system
configurations. Meanwhile, machine learning was used to analyze the importance
of different factors on solar evaporation, where thermal design was founded to
be the most significant parameter that contributes in high-efficiency solar
evaporation. Moreover, several important points for the further investigations
of solar still and solar evaporation were also discussed, including the
temperature of the air-water interface, salt rejecting and durability, the
effect of solid-liquid interaction on water phase change.
