Even in desert conditions, there exists some level of humidity that, with the right material, can be soaked up and squeezed out to produce clean drinking water. In recent years, scientists have developed a host of promising sponge-like materials for this “atmospheric water harvesting.”
But recovering the water from these materials usually requires heat — and time. Existing designs rely on heat from the sun to evaporate water from the materials and condense it into droplets. But this step can take hours or even days.
Now, MIT engineers have come up with a way to quickly recover water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. Rather than wait for the sun to evaporate water out, the team uses ultrasonic waves to shake the water out.
The researchers have developed an ultrasonic device that vibrates at high frequency. When a water-harvesting material, known as a “sorbent,” is placed on the device, the device emits ultrasound waves that are tuned to shake water molecules out of the sorbent. The team found that the device recovers water in minutes, versus the tens of minutes or hours required by thermal designs.
Unlike heat-based designs, the device does require a power source. The team envisions that the device could be powered by a small solar cell, which could also act as a sensor to detect when the sorbent is full. It could also be programmed to automatically turn on whenever a material has harvested enough moisture to be extracted. In this way, a system could soak up and shake out water from the air over many cycles in a single day.
“People have been looking for ways to harvest water from the atmosphere, which could be a big source of water particularly for desert regions and places where there is not even saltwater to desalinate,” says Svetlana Boriskina, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Now we have a way to recover water quickly and efficiently.”
Boriskina and her colleagues reported on their new device in a study appearing recently in the journal Nature Communications.
Precious hours
Boriskina’s group at MIT had generally assumed that an atmospheric water harvesting system (AWH) in the field would absorb moisture during the night, and then use the heat from the sun during the day to naturally evaporate the water and condense it for collection.
“Any material that’s very good at capturing water doesn’t want to part with that water,” Boriskina explains. “So you need to put a lot of energy and precious hours into pulling water out of the material.”
She realized there could be a faster way to recover water after Ikra Shuvo joined her group. Shuvo had been working with ultrasound for wearable medical device applications. When he and Boriskina considered ideas for new projects, they realized that ultrasound could be a way to speed up the recovery step in atmospheric water harvesting.
“It clicked: We have this big problem we’re trying to solve, and now Ikra seemed to have a tool that can be used to solve this problem,” Boriskina recalls.
45 times more efficient
Ultrasound, or ultrasonic waves, are acoustic pressure waves that travel at frequencies of over 20 kilohertz (20,000 cycles per second). Such high-frequency waves are not visible or audible to humans. And, as the team found, ultrasound vibrates at just the right frequency to shake water out of a material.
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“With ultrasound, we can precisely break the weak bonds between water molecules and the sites where they’re sitting,” Shuvo says. “It’s like the water is dancing with the waves, and this targeted disturbance creates momentum that releases the water molecules, and we can see them shake out in droplets.”
The duo designed a new ultrasonic actuator with a flat ceramic ring that vibrates when voltage is applied. This ring is surrounded by an outer ring that is studded with tiny nozzles. Water droplets that shake out of a material can drop through the nozzle and into collection vessels attached above and below the vibrating ring.
They tested the device on a previously designed atmospheric water harvesting material. Using quarter-sized samples of the material, the team first placed each sample in a humidity chamber, set to various humidity levels. Over time, the samples absorbed moisture and became saturated.
The researchers then placed each sample on the ultrasonic actuator and powered it on to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies. In all cases, the device was able to shake out enough water to dry out each sample in just a few minutes.
The researchers calculate that, compared to using heat from the sun, the ultrasonic design is 45 times more efficient at extracting water from the same material.
“The beauty of this device is that it’s completely complementary and can be an add-on to almost any sorbent material,” says Boriskina, who envisions a practical, household system might consist of a fast-absorbing material and an ultrasonic actuator, each about the size of a window.
HERE’S SOME ALREADY IN USE:
• Device Pulls Dozens of Liters of Water from the Air–Already Being Installed in Jordanian Desert Homes
• 92-Year-old Helped His Indian Neighbors Save 200,000 Liters of Water And Cut Their Electricity Bills in Half
Once the material is saturated, the actuator would briefly turn on, powered by a solar cell, to shake out the water. The material would then be ready to harvest more water, in multiple cycles throughout a single day.
“It’s all about how much water you can extract per day,” she says. “With ultrasound, we can recover water quickly, and cycle again and again. That can add up to a lot per day.”
(Source: MIT News)
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