Cheap gel film pulls buckets of drinking water per day from thin air | Hacker News Reader

Cheap gel film pulls buckets of drinking water per day from thin air

newatlas.com

25 pointsJoshTriplett5 comments

This is a pretty exciting news, if all the claims in the article are true! It could make the big and expensive desalination plants obsolete, and it would have many other uses than just drinking water.

If this is cheap and not energy intensive, then it could also be used as a solution to irrigation in arid regions. If the claims of 6L/day from a 15% humidity desert air true, then it could provide irrigation even at such places.

Does anybody know more sources of information on this technology?

Missing from the article is the size/density of the material required to achieve several liters of collected water.

Judging by the porous nature of the material, it might require fairly large collectors, e.g. 10x10 meters. If the material is manageable at these large sizes, then it would be like a giant flag or sail flapping in the breeze, that hopefully the wind won't rupture or damage.

Then for harvesting the water... you'd roll it up and squeeze it in a heated chamber?

There are other technologies coming online for capturing water in arid conditions, for example the condenser device developed a couple of years ago at Technion in Israel [1].

Still, it's quite intriguing especially given the simplicity and low cost.

1. https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-scientists-generate-water-...

> In tests, the gel film was able to wring an astonishing amount of water out of the air. At a relative humidity of 30 percent, it could produce 13 L (3.4 gal) of water per day per kilogram of gel, and even when the humidity dropped to just 15 percent – which is low, even for desert air – it could still produce more than 6 L (1.6 gal) a day per kilogram.

This could also be really good as a passive dehumidifier for humid air, especially in some of those summer months.

I was thinking the same. As humanly intolerable wet-bulb temperatures are getting more and more common, this could provide a relief for those living under such conditions who can't afford air conditioning.

Also, it would be good to know what is the energy requirement to "wring" this gel and get the water out of it. If that is high then it wouldn't be a good solution to be used as a cheap de-humidifier.

My thoughts exactly. We could run AC at higher temps if we could remove more humidity in the air and change the “feels like” instead.

I wonder if we could scale this enough that we could change the environment around us to be less humid in demand (probably as crazy to think back in the day that we would pave so much land around the world with asphalt)

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