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Emily Chase
Eathan Lee
Evan Gildernew

Water Harvesting Using Solar Energy

Access to potable water is a serious concern for large portions of the world's population. This problem is only going to get worse with the World Health Organization estimating that by 2025 half of the world’s population will be living in water stressed areas. There is about 13 thousands trillion liters of water in the atmosphere that humanity could utilize if we could develop efficient harvesting tools. This project is attempting to develop an efficient atmospheric water harvesting device. Our approach to harvesting atmospheric water reserves, is to develop substrate materials that are hydrophilic causing adsorption, even in atmospheres with 30% RH such as the Sahara desert. The hydrophilic material will adsorb until it reaches a saturation point. A small amount of heat will cause the saturated substrate to desorb the water which can be collected by a custom designed condenser. This project focused on conducting computational analysis on coupled heat and mass transport equations in Python to discover efficiencies within the design of inter and intra crystalline diffusion and the thermal transport through the layer. The computational model was developed within a Python package called FEniCS. FEniCS performs object oriented partial differential equation solving based on the finite element approach. Evan Gildernew, Eathan Lee, Emily Chase and Sungwoo Yang
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