Photo credit: Jacey Yarbrough | The University of Texas at Austin
Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin built a jacket that collects moisture from the air and turns it into clean drinking water ready for use. Practical needs for reliable water in remote locations drove much of the project. Many hikers, agricultural workers, and emergency responders operate in areas where carrying enough bottled water or finding safe sources creates constant challenges.
Guihua Yu, a professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute, led the research alongside Keith Johnston from the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering. Weixin Guan served as a lead author on the work. The smart component of the study jacket is comprised of a special biomass-based fabric. This substance is manufactured from trash, such as plants and other materials. The fundamental component of the jacket is this fabric, which absorbs water vapour from the surrounding air as you move around.
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The water’s path is simple: it flows from the air, through the fabric, and into the jacket. The water you collect is funneled into small, detachable units built right into the jacket design. Simply take these units out and set them in a foldable box to carry with you, and then heat it up or leave it in the sun until the water condenses into a liquid form that you may drink.
The amount of water you get depends on how wet the air is; if there isn’t much water in the air, you won’t get much water out of it, but the jacket itself can provide you with 400 to 900 milliliters of water per day, which equates to 14-30 ounces of water depending on how damp it is. They attempted a similar gadget made using the same technology, which could extract 1.3 liters of pure water every day. They tested it in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico and in Austin to see how it would perform in different situations, and it performed quite consistently in all of them. The output reached 4.3 liters of water per kilogram of the moisture capturing material each day.
According to testing, this cloth may offer three to ten times more water than the prior method while integrating cutting-edge technology. Yu said that water from the air is usually collected in one of these large fixed components, like a box, panel, or anything. The team wanted to change it so that you could wear the water collection bit.
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