Discarded food scraps, stray branches, seashells and many other natural materials are key ingredients in a new system that can pull drinkable water out of thin air developed by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin.
Discarded food scraps, stray branches, seashells and many other natural materials are key ingredients in a new system that can pull drinkable water out of thin air developed by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin.
This new “molecularly functionalized biomass hydrogels” system can convert a wide range of natural products into sorbents, materials that absorb liquids. By combining these sorbents with mild heat, the researchers can harvest gallons of drinkable water out of the atmosphere, even in dry conditions.
“With this breakthrough, we’ve created a universal molecular engineering strategy that allows diverse natural materials to be transformed into high-efficiency sorbents,” said Guihua Yu, a professor of materials science and mechanical engineering and Texas Materials Institute at UT Austin. “This opens up an entirely new way to think about sustainable water collection, marking a big step towards practical water harvesting systems for households and small community scale.”
In field tests, the researchers generated 14.19 liters (3.75 gallons) of clean water per kilogram of sorbent daily. Most sorbents can generate between 1 and 5 liters per kilogram per day.
Read more at University of Texas at Austin
Image: A sorbent created using biomass that can pull drinkable water out of thin air. (Credit: The University of Texas at Austin)
