A solar panel is a device that harvests water from the air in California ‘s the Mojave Desert. Omar Yaghi, a resident of Jordan, outside Amman, his neighborhood shared his experience. He used to receive water for five hours once every two weeks.
If Yaghi was not there himself to draw water, he was supposed to remain deprived of it along with his family, cow and their garden. Yaghi is a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. He along with his colleagues created a solar power device which will be available for those who are deprived of it too.
It is basically a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF). It behaves like a sponge, it grasps water vapour out of air. It does so even in desserts too and at the same time, releases it like liquid water.
“This is an amazing work that addresses the exact problem,” says Jorge Andrés Rodríguez Navarro, a MOF chemist at the University of Granada in Spain. This is an example of how MOFs enter their prime.
.”We can play and enjoy the games with identifying these and know precisely where each particle is,” says Amanda Morris, a MOF researcher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. In 1995, MOF was first synthesized by Yaghi and his colleagues.
They have created a lot many models since then. Because of this, commercial plans are getting started. It has been predicted by latest market reports that MOF’s sales for applications including storing and detecting gases will balloon to $410 million annually over the next 5 years, up from $70 million this year.
“10 years ago, MOFs showed commitment for a lot of applications,” says Omar Farha, a MOF chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “Now, that promise has become a reality.”
