This Jacket Pulls Drinking Water From Thin Air – UT Austin News

Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a jacket that harvests drinking water directly from the air. The technology could benefit anyone who spends much time in areas without easy access to drinking water, from hobbyist hikers, campers and runners to agricultural workers, emergency responders and soldiers.

“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 textile incorporated into the jacket collects moisture and funnels it to detachable harvesting units. Those units are placed in a foldable collector piece and heated to produce the water.

The jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters of drinkable water per day, about 14 to 30 ounces, depending on humidity levels.

Compared with conventional water-harvesting materials, the textile showed a three- to 10-fold improvement at scale. By focusing on the fibers rather than building another bulky device, the researchers overcame a common problem in the field.

“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 researchers are eyeing applications beyond clothing, including backpacks, tents, emergency shelters and other outdoor gear, allowing items people carry every day to help collect water from the air. Soon, they will look at applying the technology to outdoor activities, remote field operations, disaster response, and water access in arid or infrastructure-limited regions.

The textile work comes as a separate device from the same research team pulled a record amount of drinking water from the air in the hot, arid climate of the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico and the more humid environment of Austin, demonstrating the real-world potential to use atmospheric moisture to address drinking water shortages.

In tests, the researchers captured 1.3 liters of clean water per day in both arid and semi-humid areas. That equates to 4.3

liters of water per kilogram of moisture-capturing materials per day, more than any other research group has achieved.

“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.”

At the center of the device is a specially engineered hydrogel fabric made from biomass-derived materials. The fabric absorbs moisture from the air, then releases it when heated by sunlight, so the water can be condensed and collected.

The regions where the device should perform best overlap with many of the world’s most water-stressed areas, including parts of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. That makes this technology especially promising as a decentralized water solution for remote communities, emergency response and other settings where conventional water systems are difficult to build or maintain.

The device is part of the team’s broader AirGel invention, which won the top prize in the graduate category of the 2025 National Collegiate Inventors Competition.