A 2025 Nobel Prize winner has set up a company to commercialize a machine that it claims can pull 1,000 liters (about 264 US Gal) of drinkable water a day from the thin air. As Interesting Engineering reports, Professor Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, invented a machine that works effectively in desert air with 20% humidity or lower. As a self-contained off-grid device, it has the potential to provide relief to regions scattered around the globe, where water shortages are persistent or have been precipitated by a natural disaster.
Yaghi’s company, Atoco, also sees a market in “personalized water,” much like where households generate their own off-grid power from wind or solar. Prototypes have been successfully tested in places as arid as Death Valley. The 1,000 liters a day machine is far bigger than the social media prototype machine image we see alongside the Professor in the desert, at around 20ft in length, or the size of a shipping container.
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs)
The science behind this new clean water harvesting machine is based on reticular chemistry, one of Yaghi’s specialist areas. In particular, the device is packed with Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), which are synthetic porous materials engineered at the molecular level to have huge surface areas. A few grams of an MOF can have a surface area equivalent to a football arena, according to the source.
With this incredibly large surface area in such a compact form, the MOF is adept at collecting water from the air and condensing it to a liquid. Yaghi’s mechanism can do this without a power source. It uses the wind and air for water input, then the sun to drive condensation and evaporative action. It is worth repeating – the invention can operate as a self-contained, entirely off-grid device.
Atoco also touts the availability of on-grid solutions, though.
Inspired by hardship
The MOF Water Harvester device was inspired by Yaghi’s personal history, growing up in a refugee community in Jordan, where his family would listen out for the arrival of the water truck, hoping to beat the rush to fill their life-sustaining containers. The UN has been warning about water insecurity, or even water bankruptcy, for years, so inventions like this could have sizable positive impacts for humanity.
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