(Photo: The Technion)
By Naama Barak - February 24, 2020
Drinking water shortages is one of the big problems facing humanity in the coming years: according to the World Health Organization, by 2025 half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas.
With this arid forecast in mind, researchers from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology recently developed a prototype system that produces water from the air. Unlike existing water-from-air generators, the Technion system is based on a two-stage cyclic process. First, it separates moisture from the air using a highly concentrated saline solution, and then it condenses the vapor under sub-atmospheric pressure conditions.
“Our technology turns water into a commodity as it enables water to be produced anywhere in the world, without being dependent upon existing sources of liquid water,” explained the Technion’s Prof. David Broday, who developed the prototype together with colleague Prof. Eran Friedler.
“Existing technologies work simply as ‘reverse’ air conditioners, by cooling the whole air mass entering the system in order to condense the moisture,” said Friedler. “This ‘direct cooling’ approach is energetically inefficient, since such systems waste much of their energy requirements on cooling about 97 percent of the air volume, which is non-condensable.”
Read More: Israel21c