The rubbery material is made from hydrogel and can swell to absorb water vapour even in desert-like conditions, where there is only 30 per cent relative humidity in the air.
Once absorbed by the gel, the water could be heated, condensed and collected as ultrapure water.
The MIT researchers were able to achieve “record-breaking” vapour absorption by infusing the hydrogel with larger amounts of lithium chloride — a type of salt that is known to be a powerful desiccant.
This new material can be developed at speed and scale, and could potentially be used as a source of drinking water in very dry climates. Moreover, the material could also be fitted into air conditioning units as an energy-saving, dehumidifying element.
“We’ve been application-agnostic, in the sense that we mostly focus on the fundamental properties of the material,” said Carlos Díaz-Marin, a member of the Device Research Lab at MIT. “But now we are exploring widely different problems like...