Aurelia Butler

Feeling thirsty? Why not tap into the air? Even in desert conditions, there exists some level of humidity that, with the right material, can be soaked up and squeezed out to produce clean drinking water. In recent years, scientists have developed a host of promising sponge-like materials for this “atmospheric water harvesting.”But recovering the water from these materials usually requires heat — and time. Existing designs rely on heat from the sun to evaporate water from the materials and condense it into droplets. But this step can take hours or even days. Now, MIT engineers have come up with a way to quickly recover water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. Rather than wait for the sun to evaporate water out, the team uses ultrasonic waves to shake the water out.The researchers have developed an ultrasonic device that vibrates at high frequency. When a water-harvesting material, known as a “sorbent,” is placed on the device, the device emits ultrasound waves that are tuned to shake water molecules out of the sorbent. The team found that the device recovers water in minutes, versus the tens of minutes or hours required by thermal designs.

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MIT engineers design an ultrasonic system to “shake” water out of an atmospheric water harvester. The new design can recover captured water in minutes rather than hours.

Unlike heat-based designs, the device does require a power source. The team envisions that the device could be powered by a small solar cell, which could also act as a sensor to detect when the sorbent is full. It could also be programmed to automatically turn on whenever a material has harvested enough moisture to be extracted. In this way, a system could soak up and shake out water from the air over many cycles in a single day.“People have been looking for ways to harvest water from the atmosphere, which could be a big source of water particularly for desert regions and places where there is not even saltwater to desalinate,” says Svetlana Boriskina, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Now we have a way to recover water quickly and efficiently.”Boriskina and her colleagues report on their new device in a study appearing today in the journal Nature Communications. The study’s first author is Ikra Iftekhar Shuvo, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences, along with Carlos Díaz-Marín, Marvin Christen, Michael Lherbette, and Christopher Liem.Precious hoursBoriskina’s group at MIT develops materials that interact with the environment in novel ways. Recently, her group explored atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), and ways that materials can be designed to efficiently absorb water from the air. The hope is that, if they can work reliably, AWH systems would be of most benefit to communities where traditional sources of drinking water — and even saltwater — are scarce.Like other groups, Boriskina’s lab had generally assumed that an AWH system in the field would absorb moisture during the night, and then use the heat from the sun during the day to naturally evaporate the water and condense it for collection.“Any material that’s very good at capturing water doesn’t want to part with that water,” Boriskina explains. “So you need to put a lot of energy and precious hours into pulling water out of the material.”She realized there could be a faster way to recover water after Ikra Shuvo joined her group. Shuvo had been working with ultrasound for wearable medical device applications. When he and Boriskina considered ideas for new projects, they realized that ultrasound could be a way to speed up the recovery step in atmospheric water harvesting.“It clicked: We have this big problem we’re trying to solve, and now Ikra seemed to have a tool that can be used to solve this problem,” Boriskina recalls.Water danceUltrasound, or ultrasonic waves, are acoustic pressure waves that travel at frequencies of over 20 kilohertz (20,000 cycles per second). Such high-frequency waves are not visible or audible to humans. And, as the team found, ultrasound vibrates at just the right frequency to shake water out of a material.“With ultrasound, we can precisely break the weak bonds between water molecules and the sites where they’re sitting,” Shuvo says. “It’s like the water is dancing with the waves, and this targeted disturbance creates momentum that releases the water molecules, and we can see them shake out in droplets.”Shuvo and Boriskina designed a new ultrasonic actuator to recover water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. The heart of the device is a flat ceramic ring that vibrates when voltage is applied. This ring is surrounded by an outer ring that is studded with tiny nozzles. Water droplets that shake out of a material can drop through the nozzle and into collection vessels attached above and below the vibrating ring.They tested the device on a previously designed atmospheric water harvesting material. Using quarter-sized samples of the material, the team first placed each sample in a humidity chamber, set to various humidity levels. Over time, the samples absorbed moisture and became saturated. The researchers then placed each sample on the ultrasonic actuator and powered it on to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies. In all cases, the device was able to shake out enough water to dry out each sample in just a few minutes.The researchers calculate that, compared to using heat from the sun, the ultrasonic design is 45 times more efficient at extracting water from the same material.“The beauty of this device is that it’s completely complementary and can be an add-on to almost any sorbent material,” says Boriskina, who envisions a practical, household system might consist of a fast-absorbing material and an ultrasonic actuator, each about the size of a window. Once the material is saturated, the actuator would briefly turn on, powered by a solar cell, to shake out the water. The material would then be ready to harvest more water, in multiple cycles throughout a single day.“It’s all about how much water you can extract per day,” she says. “With ultrasound, we can recover water quickly, and cycle again and again. That can add up to a lot per day.”This work was supported, in part, by the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and the MIT-Israel Zuckerman STEM Fund. More

Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have developed a first-of-its-kind hydrophone built around a simple, commercially available microphone. The device, leveraging a common microfabrication process known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), is significantly smaller and less expensive than current hydrophones, yet has equal or exceeding sensitivity. The hydrophone could have applications for the U.S. Navy, as well as industry and the scientific research community.”Given the broad interest from the Navy in low-cost hydrophones, we were surprised that this design had not been pursued before,” says Daniel Freeman, who leads this work in the Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group. “Hydrophones are critical for undersea sensing in a variety of applications and platforms. Our goal was to demonstrate that we could develop a device at reduced size and cost without sacrificing performance.”Essentially an underwater microphone, a hydrophone is an instrument that converts sound waves into electrical signals, allowing us to “hear” and record sounds in the ocean and other bodies of water. These signals can later be analyzed and interpreted, providing valuable information about the underwater environment.MEMS devices are incredibly small systems — ranging from a few millimeters down to microns (smaller than a human hair) — with tiny moving parts. They are used in a variety of sensors, including microphones, gyroscopes, and accelerometers. The small size of MEMS sensors has made them crucial in various applications, from smartphones to medical devices. Currently, no commercially available hydrophones utilize MEMS technology, so the team set out to understand whether such a design was possible.With funding from the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering to develop a novel hydrophone, the team first planned to use microfabrication, an area of expertise at the laboratory, to develop their device. However, that approach proved to be too costly and involved to pursue. This obstacle led the team to pivot and build their hydrophone around a commercially available MEMS microphone. “We had to come up with an inexpensive alternative without giving up performance, and this is what led us to build the design around a microphone, which to our knowledge is a novel approach,” Freeman explains.In collaboration with researchers at Tufts University, as well as industry partners SeaLandAire Technologies and Navmar Applied Sciences Corp., the team made the hydrophone by encapsulating the MEMS microphone in a polymer with low permeability to water while leaving an air cavity around the microphone’s diaphragm (the component of the microphone that vibrates in response to sound waves). One key challenge that they faced was the possibility of losing too much signal to the packaging and the air cavity around the MEMS microphone. After a substantial amount of simulation, design iterations, and testing, the team found that the signal lost from incorporating air into the device was compensated for by the very high sensitivity of the MEMS microphone itself. As a result, the device was able to perform at a sensitivity comparable to high-end hydrophones at depths down to 400 feet and temperatures as low as 40 degrees Fahrenheit. To date, the collaborative effort has involved computational modeling, system electronics design and fabrication, prototype unit manufacturing, and calibrator and pool testing.In July, eight researchers traveled to Seneca Lake in New York to test a variety of devices. The hydrophones were lowered to increasing depths in the water — 100 feet at first, then incrementally lower down to 400 feet. At each depth, acoustic signals of varying frequencies were transmitted for the instrument to record. The transmitted signals were calibrated to a known level so they could then measure the actual sensitivity of the hydrophones across different frequencies. When the sound hits the hydrophone’s diaphragm, it generates an electrical signal that is amplified, digitized, and transmitted to a recording device at the surface for post-test data analysis. The team utilized both commercial underwater cables as well as Lincoln Laboratory’s fiber-based sensing arrays.”This was our first field test in deep water, and therefore it was an important milestone in demonstrating the ability to operate in a realistic environment, rather than the water chambers that we’d been using,” Freeman says. “Our hope was that the performance of our device would match what we’ve seen in our water tank, where we tested at high hydrostatic pressure across a range of frequencies. In other words, we hoped this test would provide results that confirm our predictions based on lab-based testing.”The test results were excellent, showing that the sensitivity and the signal-to-noise was within a few decibels of the quietest ocean state, known as sea state zero. Moreover, this performance was achieved in deep water, at 400 feet, and with very low temperatures, around 40 degrees Fahrenheit.The prototype hydrophone has applications across a wide variety of commercial and military use-cases owing to its small size, efficient power draw, and low cost.”We’re in discussion with the Department of War about transitioning this technology to the U.S. government and industry,” says Freeman. “There is still some room for optimizing the design, but we think we’ve demonstrated that this hydrophone has the key benefits of being robust, high performance, and very low cost.” More