MIT News October 14, 2020
An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, University of Utah, South Korea) had developed a similar device as a proof of concept. The system, harnessed temperature difference within the device to allow an adsorbent material to draw in moisture from the air at night and release it the next day. The current work has demonstrated adsorption-based solar-thermal-driven atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) in arid regions, but the daily water productivity remained low. They developed and tested a dual-stage AWH device with optimized transport. By recovering the latent heat of condensation of the top stage and maintaining the required temperature difference between stages, the design enables higher daily water productivity than a single-stage device without auxiliary units for heating or vapor transport. Modeling showed that by further increasing top-stage temperatures via design modifications, approximately twice the daily productivity of the single-stage configuration can be achieved. It is scalable at low-cost…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Graphical Abstract. Credit: Joule, October 14, 2020