Device pulls water from dry air, powered only by the sun

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Yaghi invented metal-organic frameworks more than 20 years ago, combining metals like magnesium or aluminum with organic molecules in a tinker-toy arrangement to create rigid, porous structures ideal for storing gases and liquids. Since then, more than 20,000 different MOFs have been created by researchers worldwide. Some hold chemicals such as hydrogen or methane: the chemical company BASF is testing one of Yaghi's MOFs in natural gas-fueled trucks, since MOF-filled tanks hold three times the methane that can be pumped under pressure into an empty tank.

Other MOFs are able to capture carbon dioxide from flue gases, catalyze the reaction of adsorbed chemicals or separate petrochemicals in processing plants.
In 2014, Yaghi and his UC Berkeley team synthesized a MOF - a combination of zirconium metal and adipic acid - that binds water vapor, and he suggested to Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at MIT, that they join forces to turn the MOF into a water-collecting system.

The system Wang and her students designed consisted of more than two pounds of dust-sized MOF crystals compressed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate, placed inside a chamber open to the air. As ambient air diffuses through the porous MOF, water molecules preferentially attach to the interior surfaces. X-ray diffraction studies have shown that the water vapor molecules often gather in groups of eight to form cubes.

Sunlight entering through a window heats up the MOF and drives the bound water toward the condenser, which is at the temperature of the outside air. The vapor condenses as liquid water and drips into a collector.

"This work offers a new way to harvest water from air that does not require high relative humidity conditions and is much more energy efficient than other existing technologies," Wang said.

This proof of concept harvester leaves much room for improvement, Yaghi said. The current MOF can absorb only 20 percent of its weight in water, but other MOF materials could possibly absorb 40 percent or more. The material can also be tweaked to be more effective at higher or lower humidity levels.

"It's not just that we made a passive device that sits there collecting water; we have now laid both the experimental and theoretical foundations so that we can screen other MOFs, thousands of which could be made, to find even better materials," he said. "There is a lot of potential for scaling up the amount of water that is being harvested. It is just a matter of further engineering now."

Yaghi and his team are at work improving their MOFs, while Wang continues to improve the harvesting system to produce more water.

"To have water running all the time, you could design a system that absorbs the humidity during the night and evolves it during the day," he said. "Or design the solar collector to allow for this at a much faster rate, where more air is pushed in. We wanted to demonstrate that if you are cut off somewhere in the desert, you could survive because of this device. A person needs about a Coke can of water per day. That is something one could collect in less than an hour with this system."


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-device-air-powered-sun.html

inb4 >where the fuck is the greentext
no

>>8856853
I can do this with a tarp

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How's the water quality for devices like this? I'd imagine it's pure H2O and you need to add electrolytes.

How about deuterium levels? Every liter of water on earth has about 1ml of heavy water. They say there are tremendous health benefits to drinking deuterium depleted water but producing it is expensive. Would water condencers that take water from the air have less heavy water?

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>>8856895
power to you, then, my friend.

(((They))) will never allow this. If we start using water harvesters, we won't be ingesting the estrogen they put in tap water to make us easier to control

>>8856853
this sounds like a negative anthropogenic impact on dry air.

>>8856926
Some places it's illegal to collect rain water from your gutters.
While technically not rain, the same argument could be used. As insane as your post is, it's still possible. Especially in the Bernstain (Trump's) universe.

>>8856938
I guarantee you they'll find a way to ban it.

>>8856895
Came to post this

>pull out all the water
>have to apply moisturizer

>>8856853
What about a dehumidifier?

>>8856912
You must be literally retarded. There are no positive or negative health effects of drinking heavy water. I mean, too much would kill you, but short of a toxic dose, there are no appreciable health effects.

Further, condensers would not alter the amount of heavy water to any significant degree. Assuming there is a slight isotopic difference, you would still need several thousand condensers in series to materially concentrate D2O or H2O selectively. Why do you think gas centrifuges are built in arrays?

Issues of legality and real world applications aside this is pretty fucking cool just from a scientific perspective.

How much does 14kg weekly of this MOF cost

>>8857040
$200 and your newborn

>>8857040
About tree-fiddy. Unlike other nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes, graphene, and bucky balls, MOFs have synthesized cheaply in tonnage quantities.