Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have created a jacket that can generate drinking water from moisture in the air. The innovation could help people who spend long periods in places where clean water is difficult to access, including hikers, campers, runners, farm workers, emergency responders, and military personnel.
“Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel, or a large sorbent bed,” said Guihua Yu, chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute and one of the leaders of the new research in Science Advances. “Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology. If the fabric itself can collect water from air, it opens a new direction for personal and portable water access.”
The jacket contains a specialized textile that captures moisture from the atmosphere and directs it into detachable collection units. These units are then placed inside a foldable collector and heated to release the water.
Depending on humidity conditions, the jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters (14 to 30 fluid ounces) of drinkable water per day.
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