Extracting Water from Desert Air with Bio-inspired Materials

This could be a big deal for desert communities in our warming world.

Deserts are deserts because they don’t have much water falling on them. People living in them often have to mine fossil groundwater, import water from other watersheds, or use expensive desalination plants if they are near an ocean. Desert air actually contains some water, in the form of humidity — not much, but it is there. Existing methods of extracting water from air don’t work well in low-humidity desert conditions, and those methods require too much energy to be widely adopted.

Now a team lead by a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas has developed a method to get usable amounts of water out of even dry air (air with less than 30% relative humidity). The team was inspired by the way certain frogs and some plants extract moisture from their surroundings through their skins. The system uses existing technologies but they are put together in a novel way. As a bonus, the system is powered by on-site solar energy.

The team has built and tested a small working model. The system has not yet been scaled up, but should present technical barriers. At scale, it has the potential to solve water shortage problems in desert communities.

Reading

Gao, Yiwei, Areianna Eason, Santiago Ricoy, Addison Cobb, Ryan Phung, Amir Kashani, Mario R. Mata, et al. “High-Yield Atmospheric Water Capture via Bioinspired Material Segregation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 44 (October 29, 2024): e2321429121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2321429121.