Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

18Atmospheric Water Harvesting Using Waste Energy from Landfills and Oilfields

Enakshi Wikramanayake, Onur Ozkan, Aritra Kar, and Vaibhav Bahadur

Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

18.1 Introduction

Most efforts to source water for industrial or personal consumption gravitate toward surface-based water bodies and groundwater. However, there is significant pressure on such conventional water sources due to rising populations and pollution levels, necessitating a serious look for alternative water sources. Interestingly, the atmosphere is one of the largest freshwater reservoirs on the planet. Depending on the geographical location and proximity to water bodies, 1 km² of land holds between 10 000–30 000 m³ of moisture above it (Bar 2004). While humanity has largely relied on atmospheric precipitation (rain, snow) for water, there have been few attempts at intentionally tapping the atmospheric moisture, other than cloud-seeding. Incidentally, the concept of condensing and harvesting moisture from air is not recent. Dew ponds in the 1400s in Europe were artificial shallow ponds (Algarni et al. 2018; Herschy 2012) that were fed by rainwater and condensation of dew. Fog fences (Algarni et al. 2018), which also date back to prehistoric times, have inspired present-day fog harvesting. This is a passive method to collect water in high-humidity areas by using mesh structures to trap fog droplets (Klemm et al. 2012). Recent ...