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posted by mrpg on Sunday June 10 2018, @10:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the O,N,Ar dept.

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

In desert trials, next-generation water harvester delivers fresh water from air

Scientists who last year built a prototype harvester to extract water from the air using only the power of the sun have scaled up the device to see how much water they can capture in arid conditions in Arizona. Using a kilogram of MOF[*], they were able to capture about 7 ounces of water from low-humidity air each 24-hour day/night cycle. A new and cheaper MOF could double that.

[...] "There is nothing like this," said Omar Yaghi, who invented the technology underlying the harvester. "It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. This laboratory-to-desert journey allowed us to really turn water harvesting from an interesting phenomenon into a science."

[*] Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are:

compounds consisting of metal ions or clusters coordinated to organic ligands to form one-, two-, or three-dimensional structures. They are a subclass of coordination polymers, with the special feature that they are often porous. The organic ligands included are sometimes referred to as "struts", one example being 1,4-benzenedicarboxylic acid (BDC).

Also at Berkeley News.

Practical water production from desert air (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat3198) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday June 11 2018, @02:03AM (1 child)

    by captain normal (2205) on Monday June 11 2018, @02:03AM (#691256)

    Yep, plus there is this: "Last October, a University of California, Berkeley, team headed down to the Arizona desert, plopped their newest prototype water harvester into the backyard of a tract home and started sucking water out of the air without any power other than sunlight..."
    Wonder if this tract home has an irrigation system with maybe a lawn?
    October in Arizona can be quite humid, with monsoonal moisture flowing up from Mexico.
    If this really works they should go to someplace like Blackrock Desert in July to test it.
         

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 11 2018, @06:10AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday June 11 2018, @06:10AM (#691297) Homepage
    Yes, plus there's this rebuttal for at least one of those schemes/scams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg
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