Drought has always been an enduring feature of the Australian landscape. In the face of even more uncertain climate projections, what can be done about the long and intensive dry periods that cause devastating impacts on agriculture water resources and ecosystems?

A potential solution developed by researchers from the University of Newcastle, is the Hydro Harvester, which is helping address water shortages in drought affected communities by extracting moisture from the atmosphere. 

The Hydro Harvester can produce high quality drinking water when and where it is required most. The Hydro Harvest is a technology that allows us to capture moisture or water from the air. Therefore, it is an atmospheric water generator. 

In a typical household you may need 20 L of water for just cooking and washing, and food preparation, per day. And a system like Hydro can easily provide that.

We can produce water at lower cost and there is absolutely no limit to the scale of the system. We can have smaller scale systems like 20 L per day all the way to very larger scale systems like for a village. 

This technology is a potential Game Changer, especially for Australian rural communities during times of drought, and like many breakthrough innovations this one began in a backyard. 

A few of us sat down together and we thought using our knowledge and skills we can actually come up with some idea. When we started it was just the concept. 

But now we are at the stage that our technical readiness level is six and when you get to technical readiness level of eight it is fully commercialised.

We're moving on that trajectory very rapidly. The system's recent development is thanks to the federal government's Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry, who provided the funding through the future drought fund, needed to take this project from proof of concept to commercialisation.

With the design now being scaled to a modular 1,000 L per day system, the future drought fund from the Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry is important, because it allows people to proactively improve their resilience to drought. 

The idea is that preparation for drought is better than waiting for the drought and then trying to do something about it. 

The research allows you to proactively plan for the next drought rather than just reactively try to deal with the impacts when they occur because if you wait for the drought to start it's often too late to do anything about it.

The impacts of drought are really far reaching not just in the rural communities but also into the cities. The research and Innovation into improving resilience and reducing the vulnerability to drought risks, any Improvement in that area will have associated savings for the wider community and society.

Water from air might sound farfetched, but all air contains water vapour even in dry and remote locations such as deserts. The research team behind the Hydro Harvester technology has developed a way to access this currently untapped water source.

Let's see how the Hydro Harvester operates. Using a two-stage process, the first is an absorption process which involves the capture of water from the air into a desiccant, which is a solid material that can hold water.

This is achieved by blowing air through a desiccant filled bed. As the air passes through the bed the desiccant particles absorb water vapour and gradually fill with water. 

The second stage is the desorption process, which involves the release of the captured water back into the air to start the desorption process. The desiccant bed is heated. The heat can be obtained from many sources, such as solar thermal energy, renewable energy or waste heat during heating.

A hot and humid airstream exits the bed and is passed through a condenser. The condenser is cooled by ambient air passing over the tubes containing water vapour, causing it to condense. 

The result is a constant stream of pure liquid water, suitable for drinking or any other process that requires high purity water.

A key advantage of the technology is that it can consistently produce water across a wide range of Australian climates, including remote desert regions. 

The amount of water produced by the Hydro Harvester primarily depends on the relative humidity, which is typically higher during the night. 

As the air becomes cooler the system can still produce water even during prolonged periods of low rainfall. As the amount of water vapor within the air is more consistent seasonally, although the humidity is typically higher closer to the coastline, the desiccant material can still absorb moisture in low humidity in land conditions. 

So we've actually developed an interactive map which anyone can access and use to determine the potential water produced by the Hydro Harvester across a wide range of Australian locations.

Using this map, we found that one unit of the Hydro Harvester can produce a guaranteed supply of drinking water for at least 500 people per day even in remote desert regions, with the potential to produce 20% more water on top of this in coastal locations. 

The primary energy consumption of the Hydro Harvester is attributed to the desorption phase during this phase the moisture is drawn out of the desiccant, essentially creating a hot fog that can then be condensed. 

Future opportunities for the Hydro Harvester, involves using waste heat and solar energy.

Doing this we can reduce our reliance on the electricity grid. The quality of water that we get from Hydro Harvester is such that you can actually put it through electrolysers, produce hydrogen and hydrogen can produce power. 

So, in a way Hydro Harvester can also assist with power generation, and both of these are essential for communities, in particular remote communities. 

The Hydro Harvester was initially conceptualised to provide an alternative drinking water source during times of drought, disaster relief and contaminated water situations.

The large-scale Hydro Harvester module offers the opportunity for centralised atmospheric water generation in communities. It allows the residents of the community to access a guaranteed amount of water every single day, which gives them water security and can alleviate stress during times of drought. 

Improving drought resilience in Australia is a multi-faceted endeavour, with technology only providing part of the answer, but when integrated with local knowledge and effective policies, this technology offers the potential to revolutionise how communities cope and adapt in extended periods of dry weather