Toward pore-engineered 3D-printed materials for sorption water harvesting, interfacial evaporation, and radiative cooling

Trajkovski, Dejan (author), Wilson Marangattil, Higgins (author), Ali, Abdallah Y.M. (author), Xu, Jiaxing (author), Wang, Ruzhu (author), Poredoš, Primož (author)

Water scarcity has intensified interest in passive, sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH), interfacial evaporation (IE), and radiative cooling (RC) technologies that operate at the energy–water–air nexus through coupled heat and mass transfer. Although these approaches are frequently associated with hierarchical porous materials, their performance depends more fundamentally on mesoscale architecture, interfacial design, and system-level integration than on intrinsic nanoscale porosity alone. Additive manufacturing (AM) offers a versatile platform for engineering such architectures, providing precise control over geometry, connectivity, and functional gradients, while also enabling post-processing routes to introduce additional porosity where required. Unlike existing reviews that primarily focus on material systems or individual applications, this review establishes a unified manufacturing- and pore-architecture-centric perspective across SAWH, IE, and RC, emphasizing how AM processing governs transfer behavior and multifunctional performance. This review focuses on the role of AM in structuring porous and semi-porous materials for SAWH, IE, and RC, with particular emphasis on extrusion-based methods such as direct ink writing that offer broad material compatibility and process flexibility. We assess the most relevant 3D printing technologies for these applications and discuss their incorporation into operational devices. To address the absence of standardized, application-specific evaluation methods, we introduce a comprehensive characterization framework linking printing resolution, architectural features, and functional performance, including sorption dynamics, thermal robustness, and multifunctional coupling. Finally, we discuss future opportunities for composite design, system-level integration, and artificial-intelligence-assisted optimization to advance scalable water and thermal management solutions.

• Language: English
• Keywords: additive manufacturing, atmospheric water harvesting, interfacial solar evaporation, materials science, nanotechnology, process engineering, radiative cooling
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.02 - Review Article
• Organization: FS - Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2026
• Number of pages: 44 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 38, iss. 61, art. e74850
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-190746
• UDC: 628.116:004.925.84
• ISSN on article: 0935-9648
• DOI: 10.1002/adma.74850
• COBISS.SI-ID: 303579395
• Publication date in RUL: 03.11.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Advanced materials
• Shortened title: Adv. mater.
• Publisher: Wiley-VCH
• ISSN: 0935-9648
• COBISS.SI-ID: 14846981

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: dodajalna proizvodnja, pridobivanje vode iz zraka, mejno solarno izhlapevanje, materiali, nanotehnologija, procesno strojništvo, sevalno hlajenje