Dry air water production is a reality

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Physicists at the University of Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a gadget that can extract water from the dry air of California and other arid regions of the world using only the energy of the Sun, according to an article published in the journal Science.

“Our dream is to create fully self-contained homes that can be fully powered by these solar powered appliances. Our experiment made this possible. You could say we took a step towards creating 'personalized' water,” says Omar Yaghi) from the University of California at Berkeley (USA).

The problem of access to water is becoming more and more acute for the Earth - according to UN estimates, by 2025 it will affect more than 14% of the world's inhabitants. Today, there are several dozen methods and technologies for desalination of seawater, some of which are even used on an industrial scale in rich Arab countries.

All of these desalination techniques have two main drawbacks - they are either too expensive and energy-consuming, or the purification systems quickly become clogged and become unusable. All this makes desalination meaningless from an economic point of view.

Yagi and his colleagues propose an alternative method for obtaining clean drinking water, implementing an idea that was previously found only in the pages of science fiction novels and films. They managed to create a system that extracts water from the air using so-called metal-organic scaffolds (MOF).

MOCs are complex polymeric materials similar in structure to a honeycomb and possessing very high porosity and strength. Today they are used to create filters capable of capturing carbon dioxide or hydrogen and trapping huge amounts of these gases.

Yagi, one of the pioneers of the IOC, discovered two years ago that a similar material consisting of zirconium and adipic acid, a descaling agent, does not absorb hydrogen, methane or other types of gases, but water molecules. This gave him the idea that frames can be used to extract water from the air.

With this idea in mind, he teamed up with engineers at MIT, and together they created a fairly simple and cheap "water generator". It works extremely primitively - the "sand" of IOC particles absorbs water from the air, and the light and heat of the Sun, directed at it by a system of mirrors, make water vapor leave them and condense in a vessel connected to this desalination plant.

Such a device, containing a kilogram of IOC, can produce about three liters of water in half a day, even from fairly dry air with 20-30% humidity. In principle, this is enough to provide a person with the necessary amount of drinking water per day.

According to Yagi, the structure of the IOC can be optimized, and it will absorb twice as much water as it does now. Scientists hope that this material and its new versions, as well as "industrial" generators that blow air under pressure, will help solve the problem of access to clean water in the driest parts of the world.