New water harvester device is capable of pulling liters of water out of the air using solar energy.
(Photo : Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley, in collaboration with mechanical engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have developed a new water harvester device capable of pulling liters of water out of the air using solar energy.
The new device, described in a paper published in the journal Science, was constructed by MIT using the so-called metal-organic framework or MOF produced at UC Berkeley. In conditions as low as 20 percent humidity, the solar-powered water harvester was able to produce more than two liters of water from the air over a 12-hour period.
“This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity,” said Omar Yaghi, who holds the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and a senior author of…
