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fresh water from the air

09.09.2013

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in collaboration with colleagues from Chile, have developed a device that collects drinking water from the air. This is not a unique human invention: in some of the planet's driest regions, plants and animals have uniquely adapted to water scarcity. In places where precipitation is extremely rare or even non-existent, animals and plants draw water directly from the air, and more specifically the fog that drifts from the oceans.

Scientists were able to repeat this "trick", only on a much larger scale, and created an installation that is capable of extracting up to 10% of moisture from the fog. Similar installations are already operating in 17 countries around the world, but their efficiency rarely reaches even 2%.

Conventional systems for collecting water from air consist of a vertical network made of polyolefin fibers. These networks are cheap, but inefficient, since even under optimal conditions they can extract only 2% of the moisture from the fog.

Specialists from MIT were able to choose the ideal network parameters and dramatically increase its efficiency. First of all, it is necessary to replace synthetic fibers with a stainless steel net with threads 2-3 times the thickness of a human hair. In addition, a special coating must be applied to the net, which allows droplets to slide more easily through the net and enter the water collection chute before the wind blows them away and carries them away with the rest of the fog. At the same time, it is important that the mesh size of the network is 2 times larger than the diameter of the fibers from which this network is made.

A prototype of the new device has been tested in coastal mountains on the edge of the Atacama Desert. With a network area of 1 sq. m. managed to get several liters of drinking water per day. Moreover, as calculations have shown, at certain times of the year such a device can collect up to 12 liters of fresh water per day. If you use a network placed in several rows one after another, then you can collect much more moisture than the calculated 10%.

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It did not matter whether the participants liked the music or what genres they listened to.

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