While it may be 3d-printed, this device isn’t quite in the realm of DIY yet thanks to needing some kinda-exotic metal oxide framework (MOF) materials.
It’s always some designer behance thing for these air moisture harvesters. Here’s the material they talk about https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/smll.202304562. Which shows a harvesting efficiency of about 0.2 g/g so you need 5x as much MOF as you want water in the end, so a liter of water per cycle requires 5 kg of MOF (not sure how the efficiency scales with increasing amounts, might be less efficient). The other issue is that if you want a liter of water, you need a LOT of air in that little chamber. 50%humidity at 30 C holds 15 grams of water per cubic meter, so 1 liter of water requires 66 cubic meters of air, or about the size of a 5mx5m room.
Additionally, to be fully passive, this machine can only be cycled once per day. So the most realistic version of this looks more like: a large, heavy container of MOF, multiple kilograms, spread out like hvac filter to maximize airflow, sits out all night when the humidity spikes, loads up on water. Then in the morning the mof is sealed into a box with a solar collector to heat the box, and water leaves the mof and condenses somewhere cooler.
Maybe a better version is lightly powered by a solar panel, and has like 4+ smaller mofs that it rotates into the sun to extract for an hour, then into the shade to absorb more, and there’s always one absorbing in the shade, and one sweating in the sun, but that will cut the efficiency of the MOF significantly since the temperature and humidity are not as good for absorption during the day.
All in all, I wish people would stop posting water harvesters. Water insecurity is not really a problem of “no water exists in this environment so I have to take it from the air” but rather a water management and infrastructure problem. And there are quite few places that experiences regular extremely high humidity, but no standing or running water.
Thunderf00t, who was right about Elon Musk, was also right about water harvesters.
Yep, I think the “cleverness” here is that it isn’t fully passive strictly speaking, it requires some human input on a regular basis to meet the posted numbers. Namely, you have to open and close the little chamber at the correct interval, and squeegee the water into the collection material every so often with that French press-like thing on the top.
It ain’t making 1.6 gallons of water a day with that little chamber no matter how much “free human labor” you add.
The internet is full of this free water bullshit. Maybe they could power it with a perpetual motion machine.
Well water from the air might be useful in space but honestly a thermal cycle dehumidifier is pretty darn efficient
I feel like if you wanted to do something that achieved a similar effect at home you could make good use of peltier devices.
Something like a solar panel to provide energy and peltier devices with radiating fins on them, with the cool side down so that all of the moisture that the cool side accumulated could drip off into a collector of some sort. I don’t think it would achieve this level of effectiveness, but I’m willing to bet you could get something working relatively inexpensively.
Once you add electricity into the mix there are a lot of options, though a peltier is so inefficient at what it does that you’d be better off using the electricity to power a refrigeration loop to “dehumidify” the air the old-fashioned way.
