Rationally Nanoengineered Tough-Gels for Sustainable Atmospheric Water Harvesting

Extracting water from the air has been emerging as a potential technology to address global water scarcity, especially in areas where safe liquid water access is not available. Sorbent-based water harvesting assisted by natural sunlight is particularly promising because regions that need this technology are often dry, and solar-rich. However, current sorbents and systems are not enough to meet the minimum daily water requirements for life. It is crucial to rationally design sorbents and systems to increase daily water productivity. Herein, we demonstrate a tough gel nanocomposite with fast absorption and desorption, which leads to significantly higher water production. The double network of tough gel integrates with carbon nanofiller as a photothermal component and deliquescent salt for fast sorption unit. Excellent mechanical properties of hybrid tough gel not only enable us to fabricate extremely thin nanocomposite, which leads to rapid sorption and desorption behaviors with a short diffusion length but also exhibits stable cyclic kinetics. The hybrid tough gel shows excellent daily water productivity with theoretically calculated cyclic conditions and a prototype water harvesting device was demonstrated in a highly controlled environment.