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Thread: New solar-powered device can pull water straight from the desert air

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    Thumbs Up New solar-powered device can pull water straight from the desert air



    Source: Science


    You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, but wringing water from the desert sky is now possible, thanks to a new spongelike device that uses sunlight to suck water vapor from air, even in low humidity. The device can produce nearly 3 liters of water per day for every kilogram of spongelike absorber it contains, and researchers say future versions will be even better. That means homes in the driest parts of the world could soon have a solar-powered appliance capable of delivering all the water they need, offering relief to billions of people.

    There are an estimated 13 trillion liters of water floating in the atmosphere at any one time, equivalent to 10% of all of the freshwater in our planet’s lakes and rivers. Over the years, researchers have developed ways to grab a few trickles, such as using fine nets to wick water from fog banks, or power-hungry dehumidifiers to condense it out of the air. But both approaches require either very humid air or far too much electricity to be broadly useful.

    To find an all-purpose solution, researchers led by Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, turned to a family of crystalline powders called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs. Yaghi developed the first MOFs—porous crystals that form continuous 3D networks—more than 20 years ago. The networks assemble in a Tinkertoy-like fashion from metal atoms that act as the hubs and sticklike organic compounds that link the hubs together. By choosing different metals and organics, chemists can dial in the properties of each MOF, controlling what gases bind to them, and how strongly they hold on.




    The new water harvester is made of metal organic framework crystals pressed into a thin sheet of copper metal and placed between a solar absorber (above) and a condenser plate (below).


    Over the past 2 decades chemists have synthesized more than 20,000 MOFs, each with unique molecule-grabbing properties. For example, Yaghi and others recently designed MOFs that absorb—and later release—methane, making them a type of high-capacity gas tank for natural gas–powered vehicles.

    In 2014, Yaghi and his colleagues synthesized a MOF that excelled at absorbing water, even under low-humidity conditions. That led him to reach out to Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, with whom he had previously worked on a project to use MOFs in automobile air conditioning. After synthesizing the new zirconium-based MOF, dubbed MOF-801, Yaghi met Wang at MIT and said, “Evelyn we have to come up with a water-harvesting device.” She agreed to give it a shot.


    Device pulls water from the air

    At night setup soaks up water vapor from air, and uses heat from the sun to release it as liquid water during the day.




    The system Wang and her students designed consists of a kilogram of dust-sized MOF crystals pressed into a thin sheet of porous copper metal. That sheet is placed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate and positioned inside a chamber. At night the chamber is opened, allowing ambient air to diffuse through the porous MOF and water molecules to stick to its interior surfaces, gathering in groups of eight to form tiny cubic droplets. In the morning, the chamber is closed, and sunlight entering through a window on top of the device then heats up the MOF, which liberates the water droplets and drives them—as vapor—toward the cooler condenser. The temperature difference, as well as the high humidity inside the chamber, causes the vapor to condense as liquid water, which drips into a collector. The setup works so well that it pulls 2.8 liters of water out of the air per day for every kilogram of MOF it contained, the Berkeley and MIT team reports today in Science.

    “It has been a longstanding dream” to harvest water from desert air, says Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the work. “This demonstration … is a significant proof of concept.” It’s also one that Yaghi says has plenty of room for improvement. For starters, zirconium costs $150 a kilogram, making water-harvesting devices too expensive to be broadly useful. However, Yaghi says his group has already had early success in designing water-grabbing MOFs that replace zirconium with aluminum, a metal that is 100 times cheaper. That could make future water harvesters cheap enough not only to slake the thirst of people in arid regions, but perhaps even supply water to farmers in the desert.


    Source: Science
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    a great idea, but will still need to be filtered as there is so many toxins these days which are airborne....

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    Quote Originally posted by ZShawn View Post
    a great idea, but will still need to be filtered as there is so many toxins these days which are airborne....
    It sure beats not having any water at all, though.

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    Quote Originally posted by ZShawn View Post
    a great idea, but will still need to be filtered as there is so many toxins these days which are airborne....
    Well, I have a few comments about that...


    • There are very few toxins in the open desert air due to the fact that winds are generally much stronger there, and that the resulting air currents thus rapidly disperse whatever toxins are in the air anyway, as opposed to the deflection of winds and the resulting circular currents in the more urban environments of an industrialized country. This is one of the reasons why there is a far lower occurrence of rain over a desert than over any other part of the continent. In a way, it's meteorologically somewhat similar to an open sea, which is why deserts are just as likely to give rise to the occurrence of tornadoes.

    • The airborne toxins which would be present in said desert air are most likely far less harmful than the toxins floating about in the air of an urban and industrialized environment.

    • The process for drawing water from the air as utilized by this device is a form of distillation, which yields water that's even purer than rain, and distillation is in itself one of the most common forms of removing impurities from water (and other liquids).

    • No one says that (the bulk of) this water would necessarily need to be used for consumption by humans and animals. It could just as easily be deployed for irrigation and making the desert green again. An array of such devices spaced fairly closely together over a small region — say a few square kilometers for starters — would have the same effect as regular rainfall over said region.


    Personally, I think this contraption opens up the door to many possibilities that would benefit humanity, and the ecosystem at large.
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    I would not describe the device as 'new' as I have read articles about devices that were present when Moses led his people into the desert. The story/legend/facts depict a device that made the 'manna fall from the sky' so I imagine that the above article is describing the same biblical device.

    There are articles available that show how Moses and his people survived - what was it - fourty days and nights in the desert? Science minded researchers have re-made the devices and have activated them to demonstrate how the 'manna' was made. It - the 'manna' contained the moisture/water needed to stay hydrated in extremely dry conditions.

    Just my research recollections and comments.

    Much Respect & Much Peace - Amanda

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    Quote Originally posted by Amanda View Post
    I would not describe the device as 'new' as I have read articles about devices that were present when Moses led his people into the desert. The story/legend/facts depict a device that made the 'manna fall from the sky' so I imagine that the above article is describing the same biblical device.

    There are articles available that show how Moses and his people survived - what was it - fourty days and nights in the desert? Science minded researchers have re-made the devices and have activated them to demonstrate how the 'manna' was made. It - the 'manna' contained the moisture/water needed to stay hydrated in extremely dry conditions.

    Just my research recollections and comments.

    Much Respect & Much Peace - Amanda
    I also think that 40 days and nights is more logical, Amanda...but they (whoever they are) say that he spent 40 years in the desert. What on earth did he do wasting 40 years for? According to Wikipedia:

    After 40 years of wandering in the desert, Moses died within sight of the Promised Land on Mount Nebo.
    Link Here

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    Quote Originally posted by Amanda View Post
    I would not describe the device as 'new' as I have read articles about devices that were present when Moses led his people into the desert. The story/legend/facts depict a device that made the 'manna fall from the sky' so I imagine that the above article is describing the same biblical device.

    There are articles available that show how Moses and his people survived - what was it - fourty days and nights in the desert? Science minded researchers have re-made the devices and have activated them to demonstrate how the 'manna' was made. It - the 'manna' contained the moisture/water needed to stay hydrated in extremely dry conditions.
    Well, first of all, you have to keep in mind that the Bible — and especially the Old Testament — is (for most part) a metaphor, as well as that it's full of subtle and not so subtle symbolism. There are historical scholars who claim that the Jewish people have never even lived as slaves in Egypt, and thus there would have been no exodus, let alone one that took 40 years of wandering around in the desert.

    Furthermore, the manna — if it was real — would probably have been a kind of fungus, perhaps even bona fide mushrooms. They could even have been magic mushrooms, which would certainly explain why Moses and his gang were roaming around senselessly for 40 years in a desert which wasn't even all that big to begin with.

    Well, either that, or the satellite navigation functionality of those two tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain with him — one ran Android, and the other one was an iPad — was badly broken.

    Uh-oh, I think I'm going to Hell now for my blasphemy.






    Quote Originally posted by Elen View Post
    I also think that 40 days and nights is more logical, Amanda...but they (whoever they are) say that he spent 40 years in the desert. What on earth did he do wasting 40 years for?
    According to the Old Testament, it was 40 years, indeed, and the reason for that as given in the Bible itself was that the Jewish people were not living according to God's will, in spite of the Ten Commandments. That is why God punished them and had them wandering around the desert for 40 years.

    Moses supposedly died before he could enter the Promised Land, as punishment for the fact that he had killed an Egyptian guard, so it was his younger brother Aaron who was given the victory of leading the Jewish people into the Promised Land.

    This in itself also has an interesting and hidden symbolism woven into it, which is a recurring theme all over the Bible, i.e. the eldest son is not the chosen one, but his younger (and often cunning) brother is. This already starts with Abel and Cain. Cain murdered his elder brother Abel, but it was Cain who would become the ancestor of the Canaanites.

    Another example can be found in the story of Esau and Jacob. Jacob conned his elder brother Esau out of his birthright and then went on to become the ancestor to modern-day Jews. After crossing a river where he supposedly fought with God himself, God crippled Jacob but could not defeat him — really? God could not defeat a mortal man? — and therefore said to him, "I shall name thee Israel", which means "he who fought with God".

    This story itself was based upon a pagan legend regarding a demon who dwelt at that particular river crossing and attacked everyone who attempted to cross, while at the same time, it also dovetails with the early Old Testament view that angels were not individual beings but merely humanoid-looking emanations of God. This description of angels was later on changed and they became more individual beings over time — i.e. the Sons of God — with an identity and name of their own.

    Even though the Old Testament makes no mention of a fallen angel named Lucifer — because, as I've already explained several times, the name Lucifer and everything ascribed to him are merely artifacts of a mistranslation in the King James Bible — the Roman Catholic Church would later on also put out the story that Lucifer had been the first, highest ranking and most loved of all angels, but that he fell from grace. And so it was his younger brother Jmmanuel — the angelic form of Yeshua (Jesus) — who was given the task of coming to Earth as the Messiah. According to Jehovah's Witnesses, Yeshua's angelic form is the archangel Michael — again: Lucifer's younger brother — who became the leader of Heaven's Legion after Lucifer's fall.

    Presumably this story was inspired by a parable told by Yeshua himself, i.e. the parable of the prodigal son, where the good son had to stand aside at the return of the prodigal son, who had squandered his life away but eventually decided to return to his father. And that duality is then once again echoed in the tale of the two murderers who were crucified alongside Yeshua — one mocked him, but the other one respected him and begged him to be pardoned for his sins.

    All three of the Abrahamic religions are metaphorical and full of contradictions — not to mention that all three of them also give a different recount of what were supposed to have been the same events — but it's all about the symbolism.

    Going back to Egypt and the time of Moses, the Angel of Death killed the firstborns of every house in Egypt that hadn't been marked with the blood of a lamb. Sticking with the theme, it would seem that Judeo-Christians apparently like the sacrifice/murder/waste of firstborn sons for some reason, with a younger son then being redeemed in his stead. The key to this metaphor is the concept of sacrifice. One child — the firstborn, i.e. the most special and most loved one — must always be sacrificed, and then another child will be redeemed for that sacrifice later, even if they have been sinners.

    The real meaning of this metaphor is of course that it's a follow-up to the supposed fall from grace by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They disobeyed God and ate the fruit from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And so what it ultimately means is that those who have seen and tasted Evil but who then voluntarily choose the Good — cfr. the return of the prodigal son — are the ones who shall be saved, while the ones who never did any Evil but only stayed on the path of Good because they were merely obeying God's orders, are less important in God's eyes, given that they have not learned any lessons.

    Tough love, is what I say.


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