Nobel Scientist Creates Device to Harvest Water From Desert Air

[00:00:00]This Nobel Prize-winning chemist just built a machine that can harvest drinking water directly out of desert air. Over 2 billion people on Earth currently lack reliable access to clean drinking water. Traditional solutions like wells, desalination plants, or long pipelines require infrastructure that the world's driest and most isolated communities simply don't have. However, a chemist at UC Berkeley, Professor Omar Yaghi, may have a solution. His Nobel Prize was for the discovery of a new class of chemistry called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs.

[00:00:27]>> Dad, that's a moth.

[00:00:29]>> Crystalline structures built by linking metal ions together with linker frameworks. They form a rigid 3D cage-like structure with each pore just a few nanometers across, roughly 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. By tailoring the internal pores with specific chemical groups, they can grab molecules straight out of both liquid and gas environments like a filter. And a single kilogram of a certain MOF has an internal surface area larger than a football field, which means that even a small device can process huge quantities of air. To adapt the platform for water harvesting, the internal pores were engineered with hydroxyl and amine groups on the surface that form hydrogen bonds with water molecules as they pass through, anchoring them in place even at low humidity in desert-like conditions. At night, as air is passed through the material, the MOF's pores slowly fill with water, absorbing up to 40% of their own weight in water overnight. Then during the day, sunlight heats the material to around 65° C, and that's enough to break the hydrogen bonds and drive the water out where it's condensed on a cooling surface inside the device without needing any electricity. Unlike traditional water capture approaches like fog nets, which require over 95% humidity to function, in early field tests in Death Valley, the system harvested up to 285 ml of water per kilogram of MOF per day, all at a humidity of below 10%. Dr. Yaghi has since founded a company, Articaco, to push the technology towards commercial deployment with the first devices due to start shipping later this year, potentially allowing us all to live out our moisture farming fantasies. If you like science that has an open pore policy, follow for more.