It seems like getting something for nothing, but you really can get drinkable water right out of the driest of desert air.
Even in the most arid places on Earth, there is some moisture in the air, and a practical way to extract that moisture could be a key to survival in such bone-dry locations. Now, researchers at MIT have proved that such an extraction system can work.
The new device, based on a concept the team first proposed last year, has now been field-tested in the very dry air of Tempe, Arizona, confirming the potential of the new method, though much work remains to scale up the process, the researchers say.
The new work is reported today in the journal Nature Communications and includes some significant improvements over the initial concept that was described last year in a paper in Science, says Evelyn Wang, the Gail E. Kendall Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who was the senior author of both papers. MIT postdoc Sameer Rao and former graduate student Hyunho Kim SM '14, PhD '18 were the lead authors of the latest paper, along with four others at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley.
Last year's paper drew a great deal of attention, Wang says. "It got a lot of hype, and some criticism," she says. Now, "all of the questions that were raised from last time were explicitly demonstrated in this paper. We've validated those points."
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