• This New Bio-Inspired Material Harvests Water Out Of Thin Air | Popular

    From Skeptix List@21:1/5 to All on Fri Dec 23 23:23:47 2016
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    All wet

    By Mary Beth Griggs posted Feb 24th, 2016 at 4:20pm

    Water, water everywhere

    What do you get when you combine a beetle, a cactus, and a pitcher
    plant? A whole new way to harvest water out of thin air.
    In a paper published today in Nature, researchers explain how they
    combined the water-collecting traits of two desert-dwellers (a
    Namib
    desert beetle and a cactus) to create a new material adapted to
    pull
    water out of the air -- even really warm air that would normally be
    very difficult to retrieve any water from.
    The beetle's contribution to the textured material was the design
    of
    the bumps, which grow on its back. These bumps not only allow water
    to
    condense more quickly, but also cause it to form larger droplets,
    which
    are easier to retrieve than droplets formed on a smooth, flat
    surface.

    But once the water droplets condense on the bumpy surface, where do
    they go? That's where the cactus comes in. By mimicking the
    asymmetrical spikes of a cactus, the researchers were able to
    develop a
    texture that swiftly funnels water droplets into even larger drops,
    even moving them against gravity to collect every last drop from
    the
    surface.
    A third biologically-inspired trait was incorporated from a pitcher
    plant, a carnivorous plant that traps small prey in a bulbous
    opening.
    The researchers added a coating that mimicked the slippery interior
    of
    a pitcher plant, which allowed the new material to drain water even
    quicker.
    The technique could be useful in areas where every drop of water
    counts, letting communities in arid places harvest water from the
    air.
    It could also be useful in more industrial applications like
    desalination plants, dehumidifiers, and other machines where it is
    useful to get water out of the air quickly.
    In order for any of that to happen, however, researchers will first
    have to figure out how to incorporate the biology-inspired designs
    into
    industrial manufacturing, a process that could take quite some
    time.


    http://www.popsci.com/new-nature-inspired-material-can-harvest-water-from-air

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