Further Progress in the Electrostatic Nucleation of Water Vapor

The planet's atmosphere holds a vast amount of water. Existing state-of-the-art “atmospheric water generation” systems mostly work by cooling the entire air flow below the dew point, which require significant amounts of energy per liter of water. As a result, the cost of this water is similar to that of imported bottled water in small single-use plastic containers. Therefore, there is an urgent need for any technology that generates usable water in an energy-efficient manner. It is known that the native dipole moment of water molecule results in the nucleation of liquid phase on carriers of electrical charge due to the suppressed evaporation. Nevertheless, the practical implementation of electrostatic water nucleation (EWN) is still in the stage of laboratory demonstrations. This work summarizes the theoretical background of the phenomenon and past experimental data, presents further experimental results and new data from practical implementation of EWN, and analyzes options for the further development.