Engineers from the University of Texas at Austin have developed a wearable textile that can harvest drinking water directly from the air. They say the technology could provide a portable source of water for hikers, agricultural workers, emergency responders, soldiers and others working in areas with limited access to safe drinking water.
Described in the journal Science Advances, the technology is built into a jacket that collects moisture from the air and channels it to detachable harvesting units. The units are then placed in a foldable collector and heated, causing the moisture to condense into drinkable water.
“Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel or a large sorbent bed,” said Guihua Yu, chair professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute, and one of the research leaders. “Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology. If the fabric itself can collect water from air, it opens a new direction for personal and portable water access,” she added in a statement.
In testing, the jacket produced between 400 and 900 millilitres of drinking water per day, depending on humidity levels.
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According to the researchers, the textile demonstrated a three- to 10-fold improvement in water-harvesting performance at scale compared with conventional atmospheric water-harvesting materials. Rather than relying on another bulky collection device, the team focused on redesigning the textile fibres to improve how water moves through the material.
“The important advance here is that the team did not simply make another material that absorbs water,” said Keith Johnston, co-author and chair professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering. “They designed a pathway for water to move quickly, from vapor in the air, to liquid on the fiber surface, and then into the textile. That transport design is what allows the material to work not just in a small lab test, but in a wearable system.”
Beyond clothing, the researchers envision incorporating the textile into backpacks, tents, emergency shelters and other outdoor equipment, allowing everyday gear to generate drinking water from atmospheric moisture. Future work will explore applications for outdoor recreation, remote field operations, disaster response and water supply in arid or infrastructure-limited regions.
The University of Texas at Austin’s Discovery to Impact commercialization office has filed a patent application for the technology.
The wearable textile builds on separate research by the same team, published in Nature Water, demonstrating a solar-powered atmospheric water harvesting device capable of producing record amounts of drinking water under both arid and humid conditions.
During field testing in New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert and in Austin, Texas, the system produced approximately 1.3 litres of drinking water per day. The device achieved a water production rate of 4.3 litres per kilogram of moisture-capturing material per day, which the researchers say exceeds previously reported results.
“This is a big stride toward practical atmospheric water harvesting,” said Weixin Guan, one of the lead authors of the Nature Water paper. “This goal has been incubated over years of work, from molecular design to real-world operation, and it is especially meaningful to see those pieces finally come together in a field-ready system.”
At the centre of the system is a hydrogel fabric made from biomass-derived materials. The material absorbs moisture from the air and releases it when heated by sunlight, allowing the water to be condensed and collected without an external energy source.
The researchers say the technology is particularly well suited to water-stressed regions, including parts of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where decentralized water supplies could support remote communities and emergency response efforts in areas lacking conventional water infrastructure.
The solar-powered device is part of the research team’s broader AirGel technology platform, which won the top graduate prize at the 2025 National Collegiate Inventors Competition.
