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, to remove all the humidity, so we can properly test its absorption potential. Our plan was to weigh the MOF-801 packet, dehydrate, and weigh it again afterwards.
To complete the drying process, we invested in a standard dehydrator (often used in drying fruits and vegetables). This operates by drying out and heating air and blowing it over the drying racks. We placed the MOF-801 packet on a drying rack, and turned the device to its maximum setting, in an attempt to heat the packet to the boiling point of water and evaporate its contents, similar to how our device wrings out the moisture. We further placed the device in direct sunlight, outside, to aid the process. (We registered the ambient temperature at 113 degrees Fahrenheit.)
We let the device run for exactly four hours in the hottest part of the day, before removing it, and weighing it. We registered a weight decrease of 0.17 grams, or approximately 0.05% (the initial weight was 3.36, and the final weight after dehydration was 3.19).
These results are promising. They demonstrate that there is adsorption occurring, and the moisture can be wrung out by the same means as our design. We suspect the lower moisture loss may be a result of the fact that the material was not insulated from the Arizona heat in storage, and moisture may have evaporated out over the past few weeks. We are excited to continue testing MOF-801, to determine more precise limits of its absorption potential in the arid Sonoran Desert.