Date Time
New Material Could Harvest Water All Day Long
Micro-engineered, bioinspired design allows the material to collect moisture from cool fog as well as generating and collecting steam under sun
Tiny structures inspired by the shape of cactus spines allow a newly created material to gather drinkable water from the air both day and night, combining two water-harvesting technologies into one.
The material, a micro-architected hydrogel membrane (more on that later), can produce water through both solar steam-water generation and fog collection-two independent processes that typically require two separate devices. A paper about the material was published in Nature Communications on May 14.