Daily fresh water production from Malaysia’s urban atmosphere using 6 thermoelectric cooling units

Abstract

Extracting fresh water from Malaysia’s atmosphere which stores a wealth of water can be conducted via the air condensation. In this study, a miniature atmospheric water generator (AWG) system named Mini-AWG was designed and constructed using 6 thermoelectric cooler (TEC) units, a mesh-shaped air filter and a ventilation fan. Subsequently, the Mini-AWG was experimented for several days under Malaysia’s outdoor climate at River Engineering and Urban Drainage Research Centre (REDAC) in Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) which is located in the urban area of Nibong Tebal. The objectives of this work are to develop a miniature AWG system using 6 TEC units to generate water by vacuuming the urban outdoor Malaysia’s atmosphere into the system, determine the impacts of the humidity rates and ambient temperatures values on the quantity of water production and analyze the quality of the water generated by the Mini-AWG system. The daily percentages of relative humidity, rates of ambient temperatures and the volume of produced water were measured which was resulted that the hourly amount of produced water by Mini-AWG were proportional to the hourly percentages of relative humidity, though they had inverse relationship with the hourly rates of ambient temperatures. The Mini-AWG produced the maximum daily fresh water of 0.355 litres experimentally in 12 hour-period in the day. According to the various hourly rates of relative humidity ranged between the least of 46% and the peak of 75% in Malaysia from morning to night, an equation of y= 1.3136x + 16.936 with R2 of 0.8901 was attained experimentally to project the amount of water production of Mini-AWG, where Y and X were designated as the percentage of humidity and the amount of water production, respectively. The examined quality parameters of the water produced from Mini-AWG was in compliance with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Malaysia class I drinking water standards.