A World Renowned Chemist Wants to Suck Water, and Carbon, Out of the Air  

Back in 2014, Omar Yaghi, a chemistry professor at the University of California, noticed something unusual about a new water-absorbing material his lab was developing. Pulling water out of the air is useful for a lot of things (think about the silica beads that come in packaging to keep things dry) but drying out desiccants in order to reuse them generally means heating them to very high temperatures, often around 400°F, which uses a lot of energy. But Yaghi’s material, an atomic-scale lattice work replete with billions of tiny pores, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), was giving up its water at a much lower temperature, around 113°F, equivalent to that of a tepid cup of coffee. “I immediately thought I could take this into the desert, and at night it extracts the water from the air,” Yaghi says. “During the day when it’s hot and sunny I can harvest the drinking water.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Yaghi, 58, is something of a one-man phenomenon in the world of chemistry. He is known for his work over the past three decades pioneering a field known as reticular chemistry, which involves precisely engineering MOF crystals with molecular-level pores. Those materials can have some interesting properties. If you’re trying to store gaseous CO2, for instance, a container containing a MOF with pores tailored to fit CO2 molecules can actually store more of them than an empty container: the MOF attracts those...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate Source Type: news