-
Harvesting water from air with less energy
July 27, 2016 Editor 0
Getting clean water to communities in parched areas of the planet remains an ongoing challenge. Recent developments that harvest water from air have been proposed as a solution. However, the technology to do so consumes a lot of energy. But based on new modeling results, scientists now report in ACS’ journalEnvironmental Science & Technology that a new system design would require less energy and produce high-quality water.
An energy-saving, liquid-desiccant vapor separation (LDS) system removes vapor from air before cooling the vapor and condensing it into potable water — a new concept for atmospheric moisture harvesting (AMH). CREDIT American Chemical Society
The atmosphere around us contains water vapor in amounts comparable to all the surface and underground liquid freshwater on the planet, according to an International Organization for Dew Utilization study published in 2000. However, current machines that collect water from this airy reservoir have major limitations. For example, one method uses electrical refrigeration to cool the air and condense the vapor, but that consumes 40 to 90 percent of the total system’s energy requirements. Scientists from the Technion (Israel) compared this strategy to their new design that uses a liquid desiccant to first separate the vapor from air and then cool only the vapor. Their calculations show that this approach would result in 20 to 65 percent energy savings over the standard system, depending on where the technology is applied and the sites’ climate conditions.
###
The authors acknowledge funding from Maccabi Carasso Ltd.
The paper’s abstract will be available on July 20 here: http://pubs.
acs. org/ doi/ abs/ 10. 1021/ acs. est. 6b01280. The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With nearly 157,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contactnewsroom@acs.org.
Related Posts
Drones for Development: Humanitarian Use Cases
Customer Intimacy, Meet Operational Excellence
Emerging capability or continuous challenge? Relocating knowledge work and managing process interfaces
What matters – and what doesn’t – for youth financial inclusion
The Role of Top-Down Management in Enterprise Innovation
Ma3Route! Brings Sanity on Our Roads
Categories: Innovation
Guiding EU researchers along the ‘last mile’ to Open Digital Science Rwanda: KCB Bank’s Mobi APP Excites Customers
Subscribe to our stories
Recent Posts
- SL Crowd Green Solutions September 21, 2020
- Digital transformation in the banking sector: surveys exploration and analytics August 3, 2020
- Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey! August 3, 2020
- 5 Tips for Crowdfunding During the Pandemic August 3, 2020
- innovation + africa; +639 new citations August 3, 2020
Categories
Archives
Popular Post-All time
- A review on biomass-based... 0.9k views
- Can blockchain disrupt ge... 669 views
- Prize-winning projects pr... 646 views
- Apply Now: $500,000 for Y... 602 views
- Test Your Value Propositi... 523 views
Comments are currently closed.