Solar power devices are now capable to extract water out of air.
These devices work on a novel kind of material which could extract a large volume of water into its various number of pores.
A report during the last year in Science Advances had found that nearly four billion residents, almost half in India as well as in China, face “severe water scarcity at least during one month of the year.” This means that water shortages have affected about two-thirds of the world’s growing population.
These shortages—and conflicts are only expected to get more popular in large parts of the globe as the climatic changes accelerate.
A team at MIT has developed the technology working in Omar Yaghi’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
These devices have components which promise a class of synthetic porous materials also known as metal-organic frameworks and are composed of organic molecules attached along with the metal atoms, which Yaghi developed.
The material consists of a massive area of the surface, in order of a football field per gram, allowing it to connect with large quantities of particles.
I call it personalised water,” he said.
The new system is composed of dust-sized MOF particles which are compressed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate, which is placed inside a chamber which is left open to the air.
The older water-harvesting technologies have been made limited to the areas having fog or other high-moisture conditions.