MIT Scientists Create a New Device That Can Extract Drinking Water Out Of Thin Air

Planet Earth, right now, is going through a feedback loop, the deadly rhythm of which is slowly ravaging the world we call our home. As CO2 chokes the atmosphere, the planet gets hotter and hotter. Now and then, volcanoes explode, spewing jets of lava and smoke that eventually contaminate the fresh water. On the poles, blazing heat triggers havoc inside the frozen ice sheets, causing them to move from their place and start melting. All this meltwater, too, is pilfered little by little with plasticized terrorists that suffocate sharks and bears to death. Simply put, our home is collapsing, and the water supply is tailing off.

All methods of water harvesting, from fog harvesting and dewing, have become unfeasible. And even if that grandma in your village still keeps her collection of rain barrels out in the veranda to collect rainwater, the sad thing is that it’s just not enough. Even the largest stack of rainbarrels or water buckets won’t be able to fulfill the scarcity of water some humans are encountering these days, especially those living in dry regions. Despite over 1300 trillion litres of fresh water available on the planet, “About two-thirds of the global population is suffering from water scarcity, and it is estimated that about 40% of the global annual water demand will not be met by 2030,” researchers reveale in a report published in the journal ACS Energy Letters in June 2024.

To unravel the aggravating issue, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US harnessed deep insights from material sciences and developed a state-of-the-art device that can sop up water from thin air, squeezing it right from the desert Sun and the molecules of vapor that flutter around. The technology works on the themes of “rapid moisture capture” and “water harvesting from dry air.” The device features adsorption-based atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH), which makes use of “adsorbent fins” and a special type of material known as a metal-organic framework (MOF) to siphon water from the air. 

It involves an “optimized design space with a fin-array adsorption bed enabled by high-density waste heat. Each fin unit consisted of a copper sheet with a thickness of 0.15 mm, sandwiched between two layers of copper foam,” according to the report. The team employed materials like zeolites, metal–organic framework materials, and hygroscopic composites to craft this device, which, essentially, is solar-powered. It was synchronized with the day-night cycle. For proof-of-concept demonstration, they created a mini version of the device with 10 small adsorbent fins placed side by side on a copper base plate about 2 millimeters apart, a distance that maximizes moisture capture from dry, desert-like air with an approximate relative humidity of 10%.

Within an hour, the base reached a temperature of 63 degrees Fahrenheit, and the fins got saturated. Once the water was collected from the fins, the team repeated the cycle 24 times and noted that “1 liter of absorbent coating on the fins could produce up to 1.3 liters of potable water per day in air with 30% relative humidity.” The remarkable device is the metaphorical Gladiator that could save humans from the blackdamp torturers, these greenhouse chemicals, that are deviously robbing the basic need of life from life, one drop at a time.