A UT Austin team built a jacket that pulls water from air
The university team says the textile system produced 400 to 900 ml per day, but it still requires removable units and heat to release water.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Why it matters
Atmospheric water harvesting has mostly meant stationary hardware. UT Austin's work tests whether the same idea can be built into gear people already carry, though the reported output still depends on humidity and a heated collection step.
Guihua Yu and engineering colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a jacket that harvests drinking water from air, the university said in a June 11 news release. The work was published June 10 in Science Advances.
The useful detail is not the jacket form factor; it is the transport system inside the textile. The fabric uses hierarchical open porous fibers to capture moisture while preserving vapor diffusion through a breathable woven structure. The removable textile units are then placed in a foldable collector and heated to release water.
The paper reports that the wearable prototype produced 3.76 to 7.45 liters of water per kg of sorbent per day across 20% to 80% relative humidity, collecting 410 to 894 ml of water. UT Austin rounded that to about 400 to 900 ml per day, or about 14 to 30 ounces, depending on humidity.
Yu, a chair professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute, framed the work as a shift away from the usual atmospheric-water hardware. "Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel or a large sorbent bed," Yu said in the release. "Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology."
Keith Johnston, a co-author and chair professor in chemical engineering, said the advance was the water pathway through the fiber system, not simply a new absorbent material. UT Austin said the textile showed a three- to 10-fold improvement at scale compared with conventional water-harvesting materials.
The same research group is also testing a separate solar water-harvesting device for arid and semi-humid environments. UT Austin said that system captured 1.3 liters of clean water per day in field tests in New Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert and Austin.