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Extracting Water from Thin Air

posted by martyb on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-well-does-it-scale-up? dept.

takyon writes:

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and MIT have created a solar-powered device that can condense up to 2.8 liters of water out of the air daily:

The system Wang and her students designed consists of a kilogram of dust-sized MOF crystals pressed into a thin sheet of porous copper metal. That sheet is placed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate and positioned inside a chamber. At night the chamber is opened, allowing ambient air to diffuse through the porous MOF and water molecules to stick to its interior surfaces, gathering in groups of eight to form tiny cubic droplets. In the morning, the chamber is closed, and sunlight entering through a window on top of the device then heats up the MOF, which liberates the water droplets and drives them—as vapor—toward the cooler condenser. The temperature difference, as well as the high humidity inside the chamber, causes the vapor to condense as liquid water, which drips into a collector. The setup works so well that it pulls 2.8 liters of water out of the air per day [DOI: 10.1126/science.aam8743] [DX] when run continuously, the Berkeley and MIT team reports today in Science.

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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday April 15 2017, @09:37PM (2 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday April 15 2017, @09:37PM (#494563) Homepage

    This reeks of unintended consequences. What happens to the ecology when you drop the humidity 99% from sucking all the water vapor out of the air? Hell if I know, but I'm sure it's not pretty.

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @11:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @11:46PM (#494592)

    Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide. Ice age time again!

  • (Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday April 20 2017, @02:09PM

    by Rivenaleem (3400) on Thursday April 20 2017, @02:09PM (#496858)

    Unless you are forever sequestering the water then it will return to the atmosphere one way or another. The only thing holding all that water in the oceans is the rate of evaporation vs the rate of precipitation and the relative humidity. If you start pulling it out of the air in one place, it will shift about and pull it from somewhere else, no?

    I'm no meteorologist, so anything I say is pure conjecture.