UC Irvine

Even about 70% of our planet is covered by water, lack of access to clean water is still a pervasive problem disturbing people all over the world. Water problems are deemed to be worse in future, given the rapidly growing population. To solve these problems calls out for a tremendous amount of research to be conducted to develop new methods/technologies of economically purifying water and harvesting water, as well as reducing associated negative impact on the environment.

In this study, we investigated water condensation at a cooled surface and the impacts of the surface property and temperature. A device was designed and developed to collect the water condensation rate in a controlled environment. The Alumina surface was used as a substrate to collect water condensation under various cooling levels of the surface. Experiment data show that the water condensation rate rapidly decreases as the difference between the surface and environmental temperature goes down. Graphene is 2D carbon materials and It is a sheet of single-atom-layer thickness which consist of sp2-hydridized carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb structure. It offers many super properties including high electrical and thermal conductivities, great mechanical properties. To investigate its presence’s impacts on water condensation rate, the Al surface randomly dispersed with graphenes was tested under the same condition to study the impact of the graphene presence on the water condensation rate. No obvious influence was identified. The study is important to investigate the surface’s enhancement of phase change and water harvest from ambient air.