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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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