Author: Ira

We are excited to announce that we are partnering with Professor Matthew Green and doctoral student Deepak Akundi at the Arizona State University Center for Negative Carbon Emissions to begin the next phase of work on our atmospheric moisture harvester. Our moisture harvester’s design centers around the water absorbing material MOF-801, the most efficient in […]

This past fall, as part of our ongoing mission to increase awareness about water conservation and the ongoing megadrought in the Southwest, we were lucky enough to participate in community outreach events twice at the Arizona Desert Botanical Gardens.  Outreach has always been a critical part of our mission; this is now our second year […]

It’s been one year now since we were awarded the STEM-In-Action Grant to continue work on our moisture harvester, bringing our critical solution closer to fruition, and this week we turned in our Final Report. We are grateful for the opportunity the grant has provided us to make significant progress over the last year. The […]

We are at the eCybermission National Judging & Educational Event in Chantilly, VA this month. You can watch us present on our grant and VOTE FOR US to bring the People’s Choice Award back to Phoenix. You don’t have to watch to vote. Just use the link below during the voting window. We’ve included a […]

Now that our desiccant has arrived, we are excited to start testing the material in an out-of-lab real-world situation, to better integrate it into our prototype.  Since our material had been shipped from a lab in Maryland (at about 40-60% RH, way more humid than Arizona, at 7% RH today), we started by dehydrating it, […]

While our desiccant was being produced and shipped, we began testing our condensation system so we would be prepared to integrate the material.  We needed to determine what form of Peltier plate apparatus would condense the most water out of the air, and funnel it into a container. To conduct the experiments, we constructed an […]

One of the problems with our original design was that the fans were moving air through the material too quickly.  Consulting with an expert further revealed that this would not only be less effective but also cause condensation on the front of the material, resulting in decreased adsorption potential.  Under the guidance and consultation of […]

We are proud to announce that we won the eCybermission Stem-In-Action grant! We will continue working on refining our solution over the next year, using this grant, after which we will report on our progress at eCybermission in Maryland, next summer. Our Grant Plan Today, many members of our community have decreasing access to water […]

Testing Plan To test our design, we began by constructing the subsystems involved and testing them separately, to save time in troubleshooting. We were unable to obtain our hygroscopic material, MOF-801, due to budgetary, access, and time restraints, so we modeled it using local weather data, and simulated it with a cup of water during […]

It is vital to prevent drought from worsening and to lessen its extent.  Attempts are actively being made at this, but they are not enough.  The three main routes are water supply increase, recycling, and conservation. A popular method for water supply increase is desalination, the process of removing the high salinity from ocean water […]