  Solar evaporation is important for many applications such as desalination,
power generation and industrial drying. Recently, some studies on evaporation
reported obtaining high energy efficiency and evaporation rate, which are based
on floating evaporation setup (FES) with nanomaterials. Here, we proposed a new
cheap and simple setup, named as airing evaporation setup (AES). It shows that
the energy efficiency of AES reaches up to 87 % under 1 kW/m2 of solar
irradiation, which is 14% higher than that of FES. Meanwhile, the total
evaporation rate of AES is about 20% higher than that of FES. The theoretical
analysis reveals that the main reason for a better performance of AES is the
increasing evaporation area. More interesting, AES could be used for designing
portable systems due to its simplicity and flexibility. Furthermore, we show
that AES and the corresponding wick material can be used in solar desalination,
textile quick-drying and warm-keeping.
