Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology-MIT have developed a technique that can extract drinkable water directly from the air even in dry regions, using heat from the sun or another source.
According to a report in the journal Joule, the technique uses an adsorbent material called zeolite, which is composed of a chemical compound named aluminophosphate. The material is widely available and can be used to extract water from the air in typical day-night temperature and heating with sunlight.
The new design extracts water from the air in two phases. In the first, the heat generated by solar power through special panels is collected and used to warm the zeolite, which absorbs humidity from the air and helps condensate it. In the second phase, water droplets are collected to be funneled together into a collecting tank.
The research team said the new system can work at humidity levels as low as 20 percent and requires no energy input other than sunlight or any other available source of low-grade heat.
The TechXplore website cited researcher Alina LaPotin from MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, saying: "The present production rate is about 0.8 liters of water per square meter, but it can be improved with some further fine-tuning and materials choices."
