ABSTRACT Passively converting ubiquitous atmospheric moisture into liquid water has emerged as an attractive solution to issues of water scarcity. However, the water transport kinetics and scalability of this technology limit the productive efficiency and productivity of water. Here, we describe a large‐scale and rapid mode of water harvesting, from which the core absorbent is produced by industrial paper‐making processes, offering exceptional cost‐effectiveness, and matching device can operate continuously and automatically. The scale‐produced functional paper exhibits good photothermal capacity and fast adsorption/desorption kinetics, that just required 14 min to reach 80% of its saturated water uptake at 30% relative humidity, and a subsequent 15 min to release the captured water under one‐sun illumination with extremely low electricity supply. A crawler‐type harvester was designed to collect atmospheric water continuously with synchronous and uninterrupted adsorption–desorption processes. The device was operated for 15 days in the field, achieving 13.3 g water m device −2 h −1 in water production across a relative humidity range of 15%–65.8%. The proposed design strategy is effective in addressing the gap between innovation and productivity for scalable atmospheric water‐generation systems.
Guan et al. (Sat,) studied this question.