Water availability and resilience is a critical issue facing humanity in emerging and developed nations alike. MoonshotWorks was hired in 2016 with the grand vision to “solve the world’s water crisis.”
As we analyzed the problem, it became readily apparent that if we worked together with Mother Nature’s Water Cycle we would be able to have access to a pure water source, independent of a standing water supply.
Atmospheric Water Generators (AWG) were a great way to resolve the water logistics problem, because they simply use standard refrigerant technology and filtration to give you a source of water from air, even in the desert. The challenge they face however, is that they all generally fail to work when it’s cold and dry outside because they are at the mercy of the outdoor environment.
We reasoned that if we were able to lever a sorbent technology in front of a traditional AWG machine, we would be able to send a super concentrated jet of warm, humid air into the intake of the AWG, thus tricking the unit into thinking it was in the tropics, when it was really in the desert.
To achieve this, we looked at sorbent technology, and found that the commercially available silica, commonly used in desiccant dehumidifiers achieved the concept, but it required too much energy to regenerate. We looked at all available other sorbents both mature and experimental Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) emerging from academia, and found them to be too unstable, delicate, quick to break down and incredibly expensive to produce.
So, we found that we needed to develop a new class of sorbents with a low regeneration temperature to solve the problem.
We engaged the world-famous Prof. Dr. Michael Zaworotko, Ph.D. (top 1% of scientists in the world) to develop us a new sorbent solution.
The solution he and his research team at the University of Limerick’s Bernal Institute developed solved the problem. They developed a new class of sorbent materials called
“Regeneration Optimized Sorbents” (ROS). These new materials are much faster, use far less energy and work at much lower temperatures and humidities than any other sorbent available in the world.
