By Amit Malewar Published: November 18, 2025
Collected at: https://www.techexplorist.com/harvestiing-water-from-air-using-ultrasound-shakes/101436/
Even the driest desert air carries a little moisture. Not much, of course, but enough that scientists have spent years trying to trap it, store it, and squeeze out every usable drop. The idea is simple. If you could pull even a tiny amount of water from the atmosphere again and again, you could create a steady supply of drinking water where almost none exists.
Researchers have created innovative sponge-like materials that absorb humidity. These materials are very effective at pulling water from the air. However, releasing that trapped water has been the slow part. It often involves waiting for sunlight to heat the material until it releases its moisture. Sometimes this can take hours. Other times, it may take days. When considering this system for use in a real community, every hour counts.
MIT engineers finally got tired of waiting.
Instead of depending on sunlight, they built a device that shakes the water out. Literally, they use high-frequency ultrasonic vibrations that gently yet powerfully break the weak bonds that hold water within these materials. When those bonds loosen, water beads up and falls out as clean droplets. And the best part is that it works in minutes.
Svetlana Boriskina, a principal research scientist at MIT, remembers how frustrating the slow evaporation process used to feel. Her team had been developing advanced materials for atmospheric water harvesting and kept running into the same issue. The materials were very good at absorbing moisture. They just did not want to release it.
You know that feeling when a sponge is so soaked that squeezing it with your hands barely works. That is what these materials were like. Full of water but stubborn about giving it back.
Everything changed when graduate student Ikra Iftekhar Shuvo joined the lab. He had been working with ultrasound for wearable medical devices. During one conversation, the idea clicked. What if ultrasound could nudge the water loose much faster than heat ever could?
It did more than nudge. It worked beautifully.
Ultrasound vibrates at frequencies too high for humans to hear. These tiny, rapid motions create just enough disturbance to shake water molecules away from the places they cling to inside the material. Shuvo describes it like watching the water dance out. One moment, the material looks dry. The next moment, droplets appear and fall away.
To make this possible, the team built a flat ceramic ring that vibrates when an electric current is applied. Around it sits a frame with small nozzles that guide the droplets into collection cups. When a water-harvesting material is placed on the center ring and the system is turned on, the water is quickly shaken out and captured.
During testing, the researchers placed small samples of water-harvesting material in humidity chambers until fully saturated. Then they set each sample on the ultrasonic device. Results were consistent. What usually took tens of minutes or hours took only a few minutes.
The team estimates that their ultrasonic extraction is about 45 times more efficient than solar heat alone. That is not a slight improvement. That is an entirely different category of performance.
Boriskina imagines a simple household setup for the future. A fast-absorbing material and an ultrasonic plate, each about the size of a window. The material grabs moisture from the air throughout the day. When it is full, a small solar cell powers the vibration for a short burst. Fresh water drips out. The material resets. And the process repeats many times in a single day.
It becomes a rhythm. Absorb. Shake. Collect. Repeat. Suddenly, atmospheric water harvesting starts to feel practical instead of experimental.
The work is reported in Nature Communications and supported by the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and the MIT Israel Zuckerman STEM Fund. And if it scales the way the researchers hope, it could offer a lifeline to communities that have no access to traditional drinking water sources.
Sometimes innovation is not about building a bigger system. Sometimes it is about shaking what you already have in exactly the right way.
Journal Reference
- Shuvo, I. I., D., C., Christen, M., Lherbette, M., Liem, C., & Boriskina, S. V. (2025). High-efficiency atmospheric water harvesting enabled by ultrasonic extraction. Nature Communications, 16(1), 9947. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-65586-2
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