Laura Gagliardi profiled in Italy’s La Stampa on her groups high-tech sponge prototype that absorbs vapor and generates water
A new high-tech sponge prototype from the Laura Gagliardi Group has been featured in one of Italy’s leading newspapers, La Stampa. Designed for the army, the prototype absorbs vapor in the desert and generates water, but also promises all-round applications, such as to clean the air of pollution. In the profile, Gagliardi discuss the wide ranging uses and applications for her scientific innovation.
The following is an english translation of the article by Paolo Travisi that appeared on September 11th, 2024:
Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water sources. With climate change underway and rising temperatures, the situation is set to worsen, especially (but not only) in those areas of the world where drought is a chronic phenomenon, which is why the process of decarbonization - the reduction of carbon dioxide in the production-industrial system - and the production of renewable energy are fundamental objectives.
"They are all connected processes: decarbonization can only happen if there are renewables accessible on a large scale, while water scarcity is linked to global warming. We scientists predict that there will be an immigration problem related to water scarcity, with climate refugees moving in search of water," explains Laura Gagliardi, a quantum chemist with academic training in Italy, who has been in the United States for years, where she has been director of the Catalyst Design for Decarbonization Center in Chicago since 2022.
Her work he tries to offer answers to the most critical problems of humanity. And it is precisely in Chicago that she is carrying out an ambitious project, entrusted to her by the army: the development of a sponge, made of an innovative material and capable of extracting water from steam in desert areas. It is about this invention that he spoke, in Milan, at the XXVIII National Congress of the Italian Chemical Society, in a conference entitled "Chemistry Elements of Future". "With my work group I deal with chemical phenomena and research and development of new materials related to climate, environmental and energy problems," he explains, "but the study does not take place in the laboratory as in traditional chemistry, but rather through computer simulations, developing models inspired by quantum physics: it is the discipline capable of describing the behavior of matter, at the level of particles, atoms and molecules, to discover or invent new materials".
While Italy can boast an excellent academic tradition in theoretical chemistry, it is well known that the United States can count on more research funds and state-of-the-art technologies.
"Computational computing allows us to make predictions more quickly than in the laboratory and, indeed, thanks to these technological possibilities we can provide more precise indications to chemists to guide their experiments," adds Gagliardi. While work in the lab takes longer and doesn't always provide all the answers, with computational simulations "we can afford to be more creative and often this opens the door to unexpected discoveries."
That's why his prototype is so interesting. "The US Army's project aimed to make drinking water available to soldiers in desert areas and for this reason we developed a device based on a spongy material created by us, called Mof, (Metal-organic framework), which has metal-organic lattices similar to Lego. The first prototype built can produce up to 5 liters of water per day with only 200 grams of material weight," notes Gagliardi, who explains how the device works: "At night, in the desert, it absorbs water vapor in the air and, during the day, transforms it into drinking liquid water. To make the process more effective, we equipped the prototype with photovoltaic cells that capture theand allow the equipment to produce water in a cyclical way, exchanging the temperature inside the sponge".
If this invention is intended for military use, Gagliardi does not hide his ambition to apply the idea, the result of long studies, to "sponges of smaller and more transportable dimensions: so anyone can take them with them to produce drinking water. It would be very useful in areas where there is a shortage of water". These are potentially wide-ranging applications, says the scholar, a member of several prestigious scientific academies, including the US National Academy of Sciences and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Mof, in fact, is not only linked to water: by changing its chemical components, the capture properties can be modified, destined for other uses.
"It could capture carbon dioxide in the air inside closed spaces that are not too large, but the idea could be extended to the external environment and, here, however, further research would be needed," Gagliardi concludes. Cement, for example, contains a lot of carbon dioxide and there are studies on new materials to be applied to cement precisely to capture CO2".