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Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have built a jacket that pulls drinkable water directly from the air, offering a potential solution for hikers, soldiers, agricultural workers, and emergency responders who operate far from reliable water sources.
How the jacket collects water
The jacket’s fabric is made from a biomass-derived hydrogel that draws in ambient moisture and channels it to detachable harvesting units. Those units sit inside a foldable collector piece, where sunlight heats them to release the water for collection. In lab testing, the jacket yielded between 400 and 900 ml of water per day, roughly 14 to 30 ounces, depending on humidity. Compared with conventional water-harvesting materials, the textile performed three to ten times better at scale, according to the researchers.
The team’s work, published in Science Advances, addresses a design gap that has limited atmospheric water harvesting to stationary devices like panels and sorbent beds. By engineering the transport pathway directly into the fiber, the fabric moves water from vapor in the air to liquid on the fiber surface and into the textile without the bulk of a standalone unit.
A separate record and a broader ambition
Alongside the jacket research, the same team published a second paper in Nature Water detailing a solar-powered harvesting device that set a new output record: 1.3 liters of clean water per day in both arid and semi-humid climates, equating to 4.3 liters per kilogram of moisture-capturing material per day. Field tests took place in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico and in Austin, Texas.
The researchers see both the fabric and the device as part of a wider push to bring atmospheric water harvesting to the regions that need it the most, including parts of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Future applications could extend to backpacks, tents, and emergency shelters.
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