the__alchemist
9 hours ago
Nearly all passive water-from-air devices described in articles are based on false claims. Peltier-based, desiccant/absorption/adsorption based, etc. All end up not working, or not existing. This has been common for ~10 years.
Which category does this fall into?:
- Fraud
- Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article
- Neither; this works as expectedbrodo
26 minutes ago
Yea, usually the next step is starting a Kickstarter campaign and then rug-pulling.
donkers
9 hours ago
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles:
https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-...
So my vote is for working as expected.
8note
6 hours ago
> Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs.
so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?
you need to scale way way up, not down
tentacleuno
8 hours ago
Many thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...
sciencejerk
7 hours ago
The team’s new design significantly limits salt leakage. Within the hydrogel itself, they included an extra ingredient: glycerol, a liquid compound that naturally stabilizes salt, keeping it within the gel rather than letting it crystallize and leak out with the water. The hydrogel itself has a microstructure that lacks nanoscale pores, which further prevents salt from escaping the material. The salt levels in the water they collected were below the standard threshold for safe drinking water, and significantly below the levels produced by many other hydrogel-based designs.
So uh, how do they get the salt out of the nanostructure? This design seems amazing but it seems like many of these designs have issues with salts accumulating and clogging up parts thereby requiring some manual maintenance or replacement parts
murderfs
4 hours ago
The salt is there to be hygroscopic, they don't want the salt out. The structure is there to keep the salt in.
jojobas
6 hours ago
Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.
throwaway81523
6 hours ago
Here's one that uses exotic materials that the developer got the 2025 Nobel chemistry prize for:
jojobas
7 hours ago
It is a dessicant dehumidifier, useless for the same reason as this MIT/Berkley thing from 9 years ago.
dsego
43 minutes ago
I'm glad someone else pointed it out, I would be skeptical of these claims. It will always be constrained by thermodynamics and local humidity. And it seems to only absorb the vapor at night and then release water in sunlight. Even if it produces what they claim, it's still barely enough to supplant the daily needs, and the jacket is probably not worth saving half liter of water.