Hydrogels come with a lot of water in them. But they can also absorb more from the air. Now a new salty hydrogel is literally thirsty and can get a lot of water out of even dry air.
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Many places in the world have a problem with drinkable water. The irony is that the air there is often full of water. Sadly, getting to that water tends to be hard. To use the water vapor in the air you need some ingenious technology. Now, a team at the University of Texas at Austin developed a salty hydrogel that can get a lot of drinking water even out of dry air.
As you might have guessed, hydrogels are full of water. Yet, under certain conditions, they can absorb a lot more water. Their potentially excellent absorbing properties are already being used by certain devices. There were even attempts at using hydrogels to get water from the air but it was shown that the process is too small and not that effective. The solution may lie in adding hygroscopic salts into the hydrogel but these salts usually don’t like it in a hydrogel.
Guihua Yu and his coworkers developed a new approach with which you can add hygroscopic salts into a hydrogel. The key lies in using polymers made from zwitterions – molecules that have both positive and negative charges in their structure while the resulting charge is 0. And final hydrogel is quite effective at mining water from the air.
Mining water is a process that includes cycles of absorbing and separating. The new hydrogel with hygroscopic salts is first put onto the air for an hour so it can absorb the water vapor in it. The hydrogel is dried in a condenser that separates the caught water and the cycle repeats. Tests show that even many such cycles have no significant effect on the efficiency of the process.
The hydrogel with hygroscopic salts performed great. Scientists managed to mine 5.87 liters of drinking water per kilogram of material per day while the atmospheric humidity was at 30 %. This is one of the best results ever. After the development is finished the hydrogel could be useful for securing drinking water in dry areas of the world.
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