Design of a Compact Multicyclic High-Performance Atmospheric Water Harvester for Arid Environments.

Water scarcity remains a grand challenge across the globe. Sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH) is an emerging and promising solution for water scarcity, especially in arid and noncoastal regions. Traditional approaches to AWH such as fog harvesting and dewing are often not applicable in an arid environment (<30% relative humidity (RH)), whereas SAWH has demonstrated great potential to provide fresh water under a wide range of climate conditions. Despite advances in materials development, most demonstrated SAWH devices still lack sufficient water production. In this work, we focus on the adsorption bed design to achieve high water production, multicyclic operation, and a compact form factor (high material loading per heat source contact area). The modeling efforts and experimental validation illustrate an optimized design space with a fin-array adsorption bed enabled by high-density waste heat, which promises 5.826 L _water kg _sorbent ^-1 day ^-1 at 30% RH within a compact 1 L adsorbent bed and commercial adsorbent materials.
Competing Interests: The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): B.E.F. and X.L. are the inventors of a provisional patent application based on this work.
(© 2024 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.)