Inventing a material that extracts water from desert air

A team of American and German physicists has created a multi-layered material based on the natural mineral zeolite and copper isotopes, which actively absorbs water vapor from dry desert air.

ACS Energy Letters notes that the material can absorb several liters of drinking water per day when an external power source is present.

The innovators, led by Li Xiangyu, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, used a zeolite-copper-based adsorbent, which is widely used in practice, to create this system to collect water from dry desert air. Their experiments showed that each kilogram of the adsorbent can collect 5.8 liters of water per day.

This material consists of aluminum, silicon and phosphorus compounds, and is a cheap analogue of the porous natural zeolite mineral with a high absorption capacity. As well as solid porous copper sheets, in addition to layers of microscopic zeolite grains, which are able to effectively absorb water vapor from dry air.

According to the inventors, this material at normal ambient temperatures tolerated by the human body can effectively absorb water from the air, but at 70 degrees Celsius and above, it releases the absorbed water, allowing water to be extracted using various heating devices and naturally by concentrating the energy of sunlight. When the copper layers are heated to a high temperature, they quickly release the amount of water they have collected within 10-12 minutes, allowing them to be used to provide water to residents of the hottest and driest regions of the world.