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 a lot of time in areas without easy access to drinking water, from hobbyist hikers, campers and runners to agricultural workers, emergency responders and soldiers. The advance in fabric technology comes alongside a new benchmark for atmospheric water harvesting.

“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 appearing 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 water.