A team of researchers from the U.S.' University of California, Berkeley has developed a device that can produce up to 1.3 liters of water per day by absorbing it from the air, while tests have proved that the device can harvest water even in a desert.

The recently developed microwave-sized device can produce more than 1.3 liters of water per kilogram per day from a given water-absorbing material, and this process can be carried out in even the hottest, driest of air in less than 40 percent relative humidity.

Chemistry Professor Omar Yaghi, who leads the team, said: "It is well known that in order to condense water from air at a low humidity – less than 40% relative humidity – you need to cool down the air to below freezing, to 0ºC, which is impractical. With our harvester, we are doing this at very low humidity without such cooling," adding that there is no other material that can do that.

The water-harvesting device was tested in the Mojave Desert in the U.S. for three days, which revealed that the device harvested 0.7 liters of water per kilogram and was able to draw 200 milliliters of air in extremely low relative humidity even on the driest of days when the relative humidity was only seven percent.

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