Water evaporation constitutes a ubiquitous physical phenomenon. This natural process enables efficient energy and resource harvesting through water interacting with materials with tailored structural, chemical, and thermal properties. Here, this work designs an evaporation-driven fabric (e-fabric) that enables the utilization of water-electricity-lithium from brine through three optimized functional layers. Interfacial charge asymmetry between the carbon black (CB) photothermal layer and Al2O3 thermal insulation layer drives directional ion transport, generating sustained hydrovoltaic output with ≈7.7 µA cm-2 current density. Under 1 kW m-2 sun irradiation, e-fabric demonstrates 1.42 kg m-2 h-1 evaporation rate in brine while the Al2O3 layer reduces thermal dissipation. The middle protonated lithium titanate (HTO) adsorption layer selectively captures Li+ which achieves an adsorption capacity of 40.87 mg m-2 during a 2-h adsorption cycle while maintaining 93.2% recovery efficiency over 8 cycles. The decoupled operation of the adsorption process from the evaporation power generation system effectively prevents ion accumulation from affecting performance. This work can provide an approach for evaporation-driven water-electricity-lithium co-production systems.
Keywords: evaporation‐driven fabric; hydrovoltaic effect; lithium extraction; water evaporation.
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