Harvesting water from air seems to have become a popular subject in recent times.
However, what happens if this harvesting was done at a large scale (e.g. providing water to thousands or even millions of humans on a daily basis) what will happen to natural humidity, weather, and the atmosphere?
"... Now, MIT engineers have come up with a way to quickly recover water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. Rather than wait for the sun to evaporate water out, the team uses ultrasonic waves to shake the water out.
The researchers have developed an ultrasonic device that vibrates at high frequency. When a water-harvesting material, known as a “sorbent,” is placed on the device, the device emits ultrasound waves that are tuned to shake water molecules out of the sorbent. The team found that the device recovers water in minutes, versus the tens of minutes or hours required by thermal designs. ..."
From the abstract:
"Atmospheric water harvesting technology, which extracts moisture from ambient air to generate water, is a promising strategy to realize decentralized water production. However, the prohibitively high energy consumption of heat-induced evaporation process of water extraction hinders the technology deployment.
Here we demonstrate that vibrational mechanical actuation can be used instead of heat to extract water from moisture harvesting materials, offering about forty-five-fold increase in the extraction energy efficiency.
We report the energy consumption for water extraction below the enthalpy of water evaporation, thus breaking the thermal limit of the energy efficiency inherent to the state-of-the-art thermal evaporation and making atmospheric water harvesting technology economically feasible for adoption on scale."
MIT engineers design an ultrasonic system to “shake” water out of an atmospheric water harvester. The new design can recover captured water in minutes rather than hours.
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