Water harvesting from air with metal-organic frameworks powered by natural sunlight

Hyunho Kim; Sungwoo Yang; Sameer R Rao; Shankar Narayanan; Eugene A Kapustin; Hiroyasu Furukawa; Ari S Umans; Omar M Yaghi; Evelyn N Wang

doi:10.1126/science.aam8743

Water harvesting from air with metal-organic frameworks powered by natural sunlight

Science. 2017 Apr 28;356(6336):430-434. doi: 10.1126/science.aam8743. Epub 2017 Apr 13.

Authors

Hyunho Kim¹, Sungwoo Yang¹, Sameer R Rao¹, Shankar Narayanan¹, Eugene A Kapustin^{2

3}, Hiroyasu Furukawa^{2

3}, Ari S Umans¹, Omar M Yaghi^{4

3

5}, Evelyn N Wang⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
² Department of Chemistry, Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute, and Berkeley Global Science Institute, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
³ Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute, and Berkeley Global Science Institute, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. yaghi@berkeley.edu enwang@mit.edu.
⁵ King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia.
⁶ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. yaghi@berkeley.edu enwang@mit.edu.

PMID: 28408720
DOI: 10.1126/science.aam8743

Abstract

Atmospheric water is a resource equivalent to ~10% of all fresh water in lakes on Earth. However, an efficient process for capturing and delivering water from air, especially at low humidity levels (down to 20%), has not been developed. We report the design and demonstration of a device based on a porous metal-organic framework {MOF-801, [Zr₆O₄(OH)₄(fumarate)₆]} that captures water from the atmosphere at ambient conditions by using low-grade heat from natural sunlight at a flux of less than 1 sun (1 kilowatt per square meter). This device is capable of harvesting 2.8 liters of water per kilogram of MOF daily at relative humidity levels as low as 20% and requires no additional input of energy.