This reminds me of Dune. Does this really work tho?
I honestly can’t believe the article didn’t mention dune.
A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
41–50 of 106 posts
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles: https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-... So my vote is for working as expected.
Many thanks for your link to the article, it was a very interesting read; fascinating to learn how glycerol interacts with lithium salts...
The team’s new design significantly limits salt leakage. Within the hydrogel itself, they included an extra ingredient: glycerol, a liquid compound that naturally stabilizes salt, keeping it within the gel rather than letting it crystallize and leak out with the water. The hydrogel itself has a microstructure that lacks nanoscale pores, which further prevents salt from escaping the material. The salt levels in the water they collected were below the standard threshold for safe drinking water, and significantly below the levels produced by many other hydrogel-based designs.
So uh, how do they get the salt out of the nanostructure? This design seems amazing but it seems like many of these designs have issues with salts accumulating and clogging up parts thereby requiring some manual maintenance or replacement parts
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#43Nearly all passive water-from-air devices described in articles are based on false claims. Peltier-based, desiccant/absorption/adsorption based, etc. All end up not working, or not existing. This has been common for ~10 years. Which category does this fall into?: - Fraud - Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article - Neither; this works as expected
It is a dessicant dehumidifier, useless for the same reason as this MIT/Berkley thing from 9 years ago.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#44Nearly all passive water-from-air devices described in articles are based on false claims. Peltier-based, desiccant/absorption/adsorption based, etc. All end up not working, or not existing. This has been common for ~10 years. Which category does this fall into?: - Fraud - Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article - Neither; this works as expected
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles: https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-... So my vote is for working as expected.
> Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs.
so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?
you need to scale way way up, not down
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#45I've heard of collecting water with tarps and assume this is like a vest form of that: https://www.campingsurvival.com/blogs/camping-survival-blogs...
Collecting water with tarps is just strategic collection of condensation/dew. Clothing has the issue of often being warmer than ambient because people are warm blooded, so it's unlikely water would condense from the air(though it can condense on the inside from evaporated sweat).
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#46Nearly all passive water-from-air devices described in articles are based on false claims. Peltier-based, desiccant/absorption/adsorption based, etc. All end up not working, or not existing. This has been common for ~10 years. Which category does this fall into?: - Fraud - Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article - Neither; this works as expected
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles: https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-... So my vote is for working as expected.
Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#47This reminds me of Dune. Does this really work tho?
Most likely not. Hard part really is rejecting the heat involved in phase change of water from vapor to liquid. You have to effectively dump that energy somewhere and all the time you do not you don't get liquid water.'
It sounds easy, but eventually you can heat up whatever you use as heat sink and then you have to wait for that to cool.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#48Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles: https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-... So my vote is for working as expected.
> Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs. so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry? you need to scale way way up, not down
A shot is ~ 35 ml to 50 ml, so one to three shots a day. :p
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#50I appreciate this style of writing. Straight to the point. No 12 paragraphs about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
You're probably talking about cooking/recipe blogs? I need those 12 paragraphs and all the ads to get to the recipe. It's dopamine.
Recipes themselves can't be copyrighted.
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
How do I protect my recipe?
A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Note that if you have secret ingredients to a recipe that you do not wish to be revealed, you should not submit your recipe for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records. See Works Not Protected by Copyright (Circular 33) (PDF, 113 KB), section "Names, Titles, Short Phrases."
https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... also goes into it.