One day in the future every home could have an appliance that is capable of pulling all the household’s water needs out of thin air, even in arid or desert climates, using only the power of the sun.

That future may not be too far off either, if the recent demonstration of a water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight to pull water sufficient litres of water out of the air in conditions as low as 20% Humidity, which is a common level in arid regions, on a daily basis.

As reported in the journal Science, the solar-powered harvester was constructed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using a metal-organic framework, or MOF produced at the University of California, Berkeley.

“This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity,” said Omar Yaghi, one of two senior authors of the paper, who holds the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and is a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy. Your electric dehumidifier at home ‘produces’ very expensive water.”

Under conditions of 20-30 % humidity, the prototype was able to pull 2.8 litres of water from the air over a 12-hour period, using one kilogram of MOF. MIT conducted rooftop tests that confirmed that the device works in real-world conditions.

“One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household,” said Yaghi, who is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, a co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute and the California Research Alliance by BASF. “To me, that will be made possible because of this experiment. I call it personalized water.”

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