Window-sized Hydrogel Panel Turns Air Into Safe Drinking Water
Resource-limited regions could soon access safe drinking water using a sustainable, self-sufficient water harvester.
Developed by a team of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the device converts air into clean water using a hydrogel material, even in low-humidity conditions.
“Through our work with soft materials, one property we know very well is the way hydrogel is very good at absorbing water from air,” said Xuanhe Zhao, MIT’s Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The harvester is made of a black, window-sized vertical hydrogel panel enclosed in a glass chamber. The team, who had previously worked with hydrogel material, designed the panel to mimic black bubble wrap, featuring small domes that expand to house the captured vapor and shrink when the collected vapor evaporates.
The glass chamber, sealed and coated with a special polymer film, maintains a cool environment, allowing the evaporated vapor to condense onto the glass. Then, the water flows down the glass and gets collected in the attached tubing system.
During their tests that ran for over a week in Death Valley, California, which is the driest region in the U.S., they found that the device managed to collect up to 160 mL of water per day. The team sees an array of these vertical panels, or larger versions of the device, as a potential solution for places where safe drinking water is scarce.
“We have built a meter-scale device that we hope to deploy in resource-limited regions, where even a solar cell is not very accessible. It’s a test of feasibility in scaling up this water harvesting technology. Now people can build it even larger, or make it into parallel panels, to supply drinking water to people and achieve real impact,” Zhao added.
MIT’s water harvester is not the first device to turn air into water. However, unlike previous models, this device operates on its own without the need for batteries, electricity, or even solar power. More importantly, the collected water is safe to drink even without additional filtering since its salt levels did not exceed the standard threshold for safe drinking water.
To minimize salt levels in the water, the team added glycerol to stabilize salt and prevent it from crystallizing and leaking out of the hydrogel with the water. They also designed the hydrogel to have zero nanoscale pores, securely trapping salt within the material.
Read the full article here to learn more about this water harvesting technology.
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