Water harvester built at MIT with MOFs from UC Berkeley. Using only sunlight, the harvester can pull liters of water from low-humidity air over a 12-hour period.
Credit: MIT / laboratory of Evelyn Wang.

A small, solar-powered device that pulls fresh water from the air? Scientists at MIT and UC Berkeley have created a prototype that does just that — and it only requires 20-30 percent humidity to work.

Professor Omar Yaghi, one of the senior scientists on the project, is calling the harvester “personalized water.” He envisions a future where water is supplied “off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household,” Yaghi said in a release.

Yaghi, a UC Berkeley chemistry professor, is also the inventor of the key element of the water harvester — metal-organic frameworks, or MOF. MOFs are compounds created by combining metals with organic molecules. The resulting materials can be highly absorbent, making them […]