New Water-Harvesting Jacket Pulls up to 30 Ounces of Drinking Water From the Air Daily
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Engineers have created innovative materials that pull drinking water from the air, including a water-harvesting jacket and a record-setting collection system.
Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have created a jacket that can generate drinking water from moisture in the air. The innovation could help people who spend long periods in places where clean water is difficult to access, including hikers, campers, runners, farm workers, emergency responders, and military personnel. “Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel, or a large sorbent bed,” said Guihua Yu, chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute and one of the leaders of the new research in Science Advances.
“Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology. If the fabric itself can collect water from air, it opens a new direction for personal and portable water access.” The jacket contains a specialized textile that captures moisture from the atmosphere and directs it into detachable collection units. These units are then placed inside a foldable collector and heated to release the water.
Depending on humidity conditions, the jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters (14 to 30 fluid ounces) of drinkable water per day. Compared with existing water harvesting materials, the textile delivered a threefold to tenfold improvement in large-scale performance. Instead of creating another bulky water collection device, the team focused on improving how water moves through the fibers, addressing a longstanding challenge in the field.
“The important advance here is that the team did not simply make another material that absorbs water,” said Keith Johnston, co-author and chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering. “They designed a pathway for water to move quickly, from vapor in the air, to liquid on the fiber surface, and then into the textile. That transport design is what allows the material to work not just in a small lab test, but in a wearable system.” The researchers believe the technology could be used in products beyond clothing, including backpacks, tents, emergency shelters, and other outdoor equipment.
Future work will focus on applications for recreation, remote field operations, disaster response, and improving water access in dry or infrastructure-limited regions. The wearable textile was developed alongside a separate system from the same research team that achieved record levels of atmospheric water collection in both the hot, dry conditions of New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert and the more humid climate of Austin. The results highlight the practical potential of using moisture from the air to help address drinking water shortages.
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