22 July, 2018
Commonly available salts and sunlight can harvest water vapor from the air to provide potable water to arid and land-locked regions of the world.
Many parts of the world, such as the sub-Saharan countries of Africa, have little or no access to surface water or ground-water supplies and often have to rely on the transportation of fresh water over long distances, which is costly and inefficient.
Yet even in the driest desert regions there is an abundance of water in the atmosphere, consisting of water vapor and water droplets. The atmosphere has been estimated to contain as much as six times more water as all the rivers on Earth and around 10 percent of all the fresh water in lakes.
Image: Peng Wang (left) and Ph.D student Renyuan Li have investigated the effectiveness of commonly available salts that capture water vapor from the air at night, and when placed under sunlight, release drinking water.
© 2018 KAUST