Device 'squeezes air into water'

Scientists' new device to "squeeze air into water" - Photo: MIT

By pageTechnology Review,The device is the work of a research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the laboratory of Professor Omar Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB).

The team hopes to perfect this new technology so that it becomes a solution to providing fresh water to the world's driest and poorest areas.

The device uses a new material that can absorb water vapor from the air to "squeeze" air into water at an unprecedented level of efficiency.

Specifically, 1kg of the new material when operating on this device can produce several liters of water per day in environmental humidity conditions of 20% - the common humidity in the driest areas of the world.

This technology holds the potential to solve one of the world's biggest challenges.

Last year, a report published in the journalScience Advancessays some 4 billion people (nearly half of whom live in India and China) face “severe water scarcity at least one month a year.”

Accordingly, water shortages are affecting two-thirds of the world's population. Along with the increasingly extreme developments of climate change, scientists predict that the level of clean water scarcity will increase in the near future.