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Engineers at Simon Fraser University have developed a system for extracting drinking water from a rich and inexhaustible source: The air.

“Even in the desert, there is dew at night,” said engineering professor Majid Bahrami. “There is more water in the air than in all the world’s rivers and it can’t run out. The more you take from the air, the more water evaporates from the rivers, lakes and oceans.”

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Our atmosphere contains about 13 trillion cubic metres of water, which is constantly renewed.

“We will use waste heat and solar power to create water from air and it’s completely sustainable,” he said.

Bahrami and PhD candidate Farshid Bagheri have fashioned a three-stage atmospheric water generator that can be run sustainably with waste heat and solar power. They will market the technology through their newly formed company, Watergenics Inc.

“This is an integration of existing technologies, the real invention is how we have put them together,” said Bahrami, who recently received a 2016 Canada Clean50 award for his innovations in sustainable heating and cooling.