Wood is gaining increasing attention in applications related to solar steam generation because of its porous structure with microchannels, low heat conduction properties, highly hydrophilic properties and renewability. Wood surface modification is required to improve steam generation performance because of its low optical absorptivity. Unfortunately, the high energy consumption fabrication process and high cost of current photothermal conversion coatings on wood impede its large-scale application. This study develops a facile pyrrole polymerization method to acquire polypyrrole decorated wood (PPy–wood) for solar evaporation enhancement. The black PPy decoration considerably improves the wood light absorption, resulting in a high absorbance (>90%) of PPy–wood within a broad wavelength range, from the ultraviolet region to the near infrared region (300–2500 nm). The combination of advantages related to wood (microchanneled porous structure, high hydrophilicity and thermal insulation) and PPy (broadband and high solar absorption capacity) for easy and fast steam generation makes PPy–wood an ideal solar steam generator, which shows rapid evaporation abilities (1.014 kg m⁻² h⁻¹) and high evaporation efficiency (72.5%) under simulated one sun irradiation. Moreover, the obtained clean water using PPy–wood as the steam generator shows low ion concentrations and high transmittance, demonstrating that PPy–wood possesses excellent potential for seawater desalination and sewage treatment. Thus, such PPy–wood is a potential candidate for water desalination and purification to address water scarcity issues through the effective utilization of clean energy.

Interfacial solar energy evaporation is an effective measure to alleviate the current global shortage of clean water resources. However, many solar evaporators are two-dimensional (2D) structured devices developed by coating light-absorbing materials on the surface of host materials, and the efficiency of solar steam generation is limited. For this reason, the present study reports a facile and environment-friendly method to construct a conical three-dimensional (3D) wooden evaporator, which uses flexible wood as the substrate and tannic acid complex as the light-absorbing material and is formed by further convolution. Reasonable structural design and material combination enable the evaporator to show excellent mildew resistance and highly efficient evaporation performance. The black decoration considerably improves the wood light absorption, resulting in high absorbance (>90%) of DW-TA-Fe³⁺ in the wavelength range of 200–800 nm. The water evaporation rate of the wooden cone evaporator can reach up to 1.79 kg m⁻² h⁻¹, about 1.6 times higher than that of the 2D evaporator. Moreover, the evaporator exhibits outstanding biological stability and effective desalination performance. This work is expected to offer a new direction in designing a 3D wooden evaporator for effective solar water desalination.