There are around 12 to 13,000 trillion liters of water in Earth’s atmosphere, which is an equivalent of 10% of all of the freshwater in our planet’s lakes and rivers. Over the years, researchers and scientists have tried to develop a means to harvest some of the fresh water from air but they have never really ‘succeeded’ until now.
Image source: Sciencemag.org
To find an all-purpose solution, researchers led by Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, turned to a family of crystalline powders called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs. A device capable of wringing water from the sky… The ecstatic part is, the spongelike device is powered by sunlight.
How it works
Image source: Sciencemag.org
The new device has three parts: a highly porous layer to capture water from ambient air, a solar collector to heat that layer and release the water, and a condenser to turn that vapor into liquid water.
The idea is that the MOF (spongelike device) would adsorb water from the air at night. When the sun comes up, it shines on graphite layered on top of the MOF. That heats up, dumping enough energy into the MOF to release the water as a vapor, from which a condenser could make liquid water at ambient temperatures.
I know you didn’t understand a word of what i said up above, even i coundn’t comprehend it. But here’s what you can understand.
The device can produce nearly 3 liters of water per day for every kilogram of spongelike absorber it contains, and researchers say future versions will be even better. That means homes in the driest parts of the world could soon have a solar-powered device capable of delivering all the water they need, offering relief to billions of people including farmers in the desert.
(Sources: Sciencemag | Forbes)
