Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new method that can extract nearly four gallons of clean drinking water directly from the air by using just a single kilogram of everyday biomass, such as food scraps and seashells.
This system transforms these everyday biomass into “molecularly functionalized biomass hydrogels” that harvest water directly from the atmosphere.
“This material gives us a way to tap into nature’s most abundant resources and make water from air—anytime, anywhere,” said Weixin Guan, the lead researcher of the study.
“With this breakthrough, we’ve created a universal molecular engineering strategy that allows diverse natural materials to be transformed into high-efficiency sorbents,” added Guihua Yu, a professor at Texas Materials Institute at UT Austin.
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