In the same way that dew naturally forms outside, when the warm air meets the cooler air inside the machine, drops of liquid form. A second fan recirculates another stream of air heated by the solar collector. A fan pulls in outside air and a desiccant absorbs moisture from it.
(Some others, like a startup called Source, use a related design.) It has few parts. It uses only a few solar photovoltaic cells to power its fans, and relies mostly on solar heat. The device is designed to work off-grid, and eliminate every possible expense. But, in many places, it can provide sufficient drinking water. And all of that doesn’t have to be as clean…Once we had that perspective shift, all of the sudden solutions that hadn’t seemed plausible suddenly seemed plausible.”Ītmospheric water harvesting devices use a very large amount of energy to generate each liter of water, so the kind of simple, low-cost device the team developed could never produce enough water to meet every need. “The other 99.9% is for things like bathing and cleaning the dishes and agriculture and things like that. “One-tenth of 1% of the clean water in the world goes into our mouths,” says Astro Teller, the head of X. The team had tried to find ways to generate clean water multiple times, but only began focusing on atmospheric water harvesting after realizing that it could narrow its scope to think only about drinking water, not water used for other purposes. The X team works on multiple major challenges simultaneously, including new approaches to renewable energy and more sustainable ways to grow food. “This can leapfrog a lot of that and go directly to the source with a small device that’s solar powered,” says Jackson Lord, lead author of the paper, who previously worked at X on the project. When the air is too dry, for example, the devices don’t work well, but the study found that 1 billion people who currently don’t have safe drinking water live in places where the device would function well.īecause larger water infrastructure projects, like desalination plants, take many years to plan and build, the small devices could help fill the gap in the meantime. Then it compared those locations with the ideal climate conditions for using an atmospheric water harvester. The X team used WHO/UNICEF datasets that mapped out exactly where these people live and, for the first time, compared those locations with the ideal climate conditions for using an atmospheric water harvester. Globally, as many as one in three people still drink unsafe water that can spread diseases. In a new paper published today in Nature, the team calculates how much this type of device could potentially help give more people access to water that’s safe to drink.
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