SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @02:04AM
One missing piece of data -- the relative humidity in Arizona isn't all that low, see https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Arizona/humidity-annual.php [currentresults.com]
Since the air temps in AZ are often high (increases ability to hold moisture), the absolute amount of moisture in the air is significant.
If you want dry air, go into any heated house in the winter when it's below freezing outside (assuming no added house humidification). Heating cold outside air (nearly independent of the RH% at the cold outside temp) winds up with very low RH % at room temps.