Just imagine a place where water comes from air and energy from the sun. this is the kind if future that is moving towards it. There are ways being created that will help in turning this pretty picture into reality. Recently, a progress was made, when a team of creators came up with a new kind of water harvester that only uses mild sunlight that can pull gallons of water from dry air. The device can work pretty well even in the conditions when air has humidity as less as twenty percent. The solar-powered harvester was built at MIT with a special kind of material known as MOF or Metal Organic Framework that was generated at University of California, Berkeley.
Omar Yaghi, one of the senior authors of the paper written on this research, adds, “This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity. There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy. Your electric dehumidifier at home ‘produces’ very expensive water.” this prototype was able to extract approx. 2.8-litres of water from dry air that had just 20-30 percent humidity. Yaghi further adds, “One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household. To me, that will be made possible because of this experiment. I call it personalized water.”
Yaghi developed MOFs more than two decades back which combined aluminum and magnesium with some organic molecules as a tinker-toy arrangement for creation of porous, rigid structures that are pretty ideal for strong liquids and gases. Since then, they have created more than twenty thousand MOFs all over the world. There are a few others that hold together gases like methane or hydrogen.
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