How To Make Drinkable Water From Air?

Drinkable Water is surprisingly not as abundant as salt water is on earth. Some parts of the world are lucky to have an abundant supply of fresh drinkable water, whereas there are other parts of the world that are not so lucky. Research data courtesy of the Water Scarcity Atlas shows just how much the challenge has worsened over time.

One can clearly see how the population living in scarcity of drinkable water has spread farther and farther away from the equator line in the past hundred years alone.

While technological innovation and aggressive and unethical corporate exploitation are worsening the challenge of scarcity of drinkable water in the regions shown above, more and more tech innovators and researchers are trying to use technology to solve this problem. I recently stumbled upon a very interesting piece of technology that makes drinkable water from air. This article explores its background, and touches upon how it works.

The Background Behind the Technology

The research quest was carried out by a team called X, the moonshot factory of Alphabet (the parent concern behind Google) Inc. Their aim was apparently to solve the problem such that the final device would cost around 1 cent per liter of water produced. But in the end (of their project timeframe), they managed to get it down to 10 cents per liter, which was too high for them to pursue large scale business implementations. So, they decided to drop the project.

This essay is supported by Generatebg

However, the team recognized the potential of the tech even at 10 cents per liter, and decided to open source the project. They released all the details of the project with the hope that innovators all around the world might find a way to solve this problem further and reduce the cost of the device even more. You can read all technical details of the science involved from the paper released by the team in Nature.

The Device

The prototype device, called the Atmospheric Water Harvester, uses sunlight to heat an air stream that is pulled-in using a fan that operates inside the device. An absorbent material called the desiccant absorbs moisture from the heated air that is flowing in. The now warm and humid air is made to mix with a cooler stream of air in a heat exchange chamber. Condensed water is then collected at the bottom of the device. Finally, the cooled air is looped back to be reheated, and the operation continues cyclically.

The Future

The challenge with such a device implemented at a mass-scale would be the cost of production, and maintenance costs. There is also the added challenge that the device takes advantage of the humidity in the air. This means that it is not going to be effective in dry regions, and on particularly dry days. Having said that, most of the regions that suffer from water scarcity on earth offer enough humidity for such a device to prove useful. According to the development team, their prototype managed to produce about 5 liters of water a day, so the results do indeed look promising.

If this project interests you, and you’d like to work on a problem that could literally change lives around the globe, all the information you need to get started on this are available here for free.

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Further reading that might interest you: 5 Reasons Why Nuclear Power Is The Future and How To Best Optimize Energy Consumption.