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Comment by donkers | Hacker News Reader

The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles:

https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-...

So my vote is for working as expected.

> Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs.

so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?

you need to scale way way up, not down

A shot is ~ 35 ml to 50 ml, so one to three shots a day. :p

1.5oz in the US, which is about 44mL

That's about the average of 35mL and 50mL. ;)

If a human needs about 1L per day on a minimal survival scenario, we're talking 20+ jackets right?

Just get your friends to wear them too.

who gets to drink today?

It's the new drinking game, obvs.

Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.

I believe this uses absorption; not cooling [condensation].

Abortion release the same amount of heat than condensation. So you can cool the material before and get condensation or absorb the water and cool the material later.

Sweating keeps you cool, absorbing the sweat will cancel the cooling effect and you will overheat and may die.

Many thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...

The team’s new design significantly limits salt leakage. Within the hydrogel itself, they included an extra ingredient: glycerol, a liquid compound that naturally stabilizes salt, keeping it within the gel rather than letting it crystallize and leak out with the water. The hydrogel itself has a microstructure that lacks nanoscale pores, which further prevents salt from escaping the material. The salt levels in the water they collected were below the standard threshold for safe drinking water, and significantly below the levels produced by many other hydrogel-based designs.

So uh, how do they get the salt out of the nanostructure? This design seems amazing but it seems like many of these designs have issues with salts accumulating and clogging up parts thereby requiring some manual maintenance or replacement parts

The salt is there to be hygroscopic, they don't want the salt out. The structure is there to keep the salt in.

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