PREVIEW

A new jacket that can pull drinking water from the air has been developed by engineers - offering a potential lifeline for hikers, campers, emergency workers and people living in dry regions.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin created the wearable technology using a special fabric that collects moisture from the atmosphere before turning it into safe drinking water.

The team says the jacket could help anyone spending long periods away from reliable water supplies, including runners, agricultural workers, soldiers and disaster response teams.

“Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel or a large sorbent bed,” said Guihua Yu, chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute and one of the leaders of the new research in Science Advances.

“Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology. If the fabric itself can collect water from air, it opens a new direction for personal and portable water access.”

The jacket contains a moisture-collecting textile that captures water from the air and directs it into detachable harvesting units. These units are then placed inside a foldable collector, where gentle heating releases the water for drinking.

During testing, the jacket produced between 400 and 900 millilitres of drinking water a day, depending on how humid the air was.

The researchers say the fabric performed between three and 10 times better than conventional water-harvesting materials when tested at a practical scale.

“The important advance here is that the team did not simply make another material that absorbs water,” said Keith Johnston, co-author and chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering.

“They designed a pathway for water to move quickly, from vapor in the air, to liquid on the fiber surface, and then into the textile. That transport design is what allows the material to work not just in a small lab test, but in a wearable system.”

The team believes the same technology could also be used in backpacks, tents, emergency shelters and other outdoor equipment, allowing everyday gear to collect water from the atmosphere.

Researchers are now planning to explore its use during outdoor adventures, remote field work, disaster relief efforts and in regions where access to clean drinking water is limited. The university has also filed a patent application for the invention.

The breakthrough comes alongside another water-harvesting device developed by the same research team, which has also shown promising real-world results.

Tested in both the hot, dry Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico and the more humid climate of Austin, Texas, the device collected 1.3 litres of clean drinking water per day.

That worked out at 4.3 litres of water per kilogram of moisture-harvesting material each day — a figure the researchers say is higher than any previously reported by another research group.

“This is a big stride toward practical atmospheric water harvesting,” said Weixin Guan, one of the lead authors of a new paper published in Nature Water.

“This goal has been incubated over years of work, from molecular design to real-world operation, and it is especially meaningful to see those pieces finally come together in a field-ready system.”

The device uses a specially designed fabric made from plant-based materials that absorbs moisture from the air before releasing it when warmed by sunlight, allowing the water to be collected.

Researchers say it could be particularly useful in some of the world's driest regions, including parts of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where access to clean water remains a major challenge.