Drinking water can be made from air and sunlight, and a company is doing it

Getting clean, drinkable water out of the air sounds good, especially in water-scarce environments, where people who live there have to travel long distances to get a dreary bucket of water for drinking and cooking.

According to a UNICEF and WHO report, one in three people in the world does not have access to safe drinking water. One in three!

There have been techniques for condensing water from the air for a long time, but today they require connection to the electricity grid, so many times the accounts do not come out, it is too expensive to obtain water from the air.

Now there’s a company that can pull water out of the air without using the power grid or extra carbon. This is SOURCE Global, a company that uses solar energy to condense clean drinking water free of air pollutants.

The system they produce not only brings drinking water to homes, it also manages to mineralize the water to obtain the ideal hardness and taste.

In an article published on interestingengineering.com they have interviewed one of the company’s managers, who tells us about their hydropanels and how they are capable of generating passive condensation and using efficient means to collect that water.

The Hydropanel has a traditional solar panel that powers the entire system. On both sides are two dark rectangles that we call solar thermal panels that absorb as much thermal energy as possible.

What they achieve is that the interior of the panel is warmer than the air that surrounds it, and that means that pure water is obtained. both in deserts and in polluted environments.

This cooler ambient air is loaded with water vapor that condenses into liquid water. And this liquid water is collected in a proprietary hygroscopic material inside the machine. The material allows water molecules to pass through the membrane.

Depending on the weather they manage to generate more or less water. In one case they get a panel to produce 72 liters of water per month, but it all depends on the amount of humidity in the place where they are installed.

The competition only manages to generate water with ambient humidity of 30 to 40 percent, but by using passive condensation, this company manages to do so with humidity of only 7%. On the other hand, we are talking about a completely autonomous and self-powered system, it only needs Sol.

Now they are working so that the system does not break down in very cold climates, since it could break when trying to process ice.