A simple, compact system first collects moisture from the air and then releases the trapped liquid when heated, which results in potable water. Credit: Xiangyu Li, editedClean, safe water is a limited resource, and access to it depends on local bodies of water. But even dry regions have some water vapor in the air. To harvest small amounts of humidity, researchers inhave developed a compact device with absorbent-coated fins that first trap moisture and then generate potable water when heated.
However, for these absorbents to be practical for real-world use, they need to be incorporated into compact and portable devices with a waste heat source, such as applications that run at high temperatures or systems that emit heat as a by-product. So, Xiangyu Li, Bachir El Fil, and colleagues developed a humidity harvester that could fit those specifications.
For proof-of-concept demonstrations, they created a 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 desert-like air containing 10% relative humidity. Within an hour, the fins saturated and then released the trapped moisture once the base reached 363Extrapolating to 24 collection-release cycles, the team calculated that 1 liter of absorbent coating on the fins could produce up to 1.
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