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Though his lab in Skokie, Illinois, is thousands of miles from the deserts of Africa, Timur Islamoglu spends his days thinking about how to find enough water in that arid environment. 

Islamoglu, a lead research scientist at the Materials Discovery Research Institute (MDRI), is working to develop substances with just the right combination of qualities to capture moisture from dry air and turn it into a sustainable source of drinking water. He’s targeting arid regions with relative humidities below 30 percent. “Those are the areas that require these technologies, because climate change is expected to exacerbate droughts and reduce precipitation in these already dry regions, intensifying the need for alternative water sources,” Islamoglu says.  

Sustainability is the primary focus for MDRI, the newest division of UL Research Institutes (ULRI). Launched in 2022, MDRI opened its state-of-the-art laboratory in September 2024, complete with equipment for automating chemical synthesis and data collection for use with machine-learning techniques. The lab’s goal is to tackle the problems of climate change and energy storage with projects aimed at providing safe drinking water, removing excess carbon, and finding more efficient ways to create, store, and use hydrogen as an alternative and clean fuel source. 

“Everyone in the world deserves safe drinking water,” says Stuart Miller, vice president and executive director of MDRI, and providing cheap access to power has great potential to lift people out of poverty. “The greatest challenge that we have now is, how do we do that and still be good stewards of the planet so that we don’t add any carbon dioxide?” Miller says. Developing better materials can help.

Digital-first materials 

In the 170 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have developed all sorts of useful materials to create our modern world. Many of them are petroleum-based. But with carbon from fossil fuels rapidly heating the planet, and a population that could reach 10 billion in the 2050s, humanity needs to move away from petroleum and discover new materials for energy storage and production, Miller says. Finding candidates through trial and error would involve sifting through many combinations of different materials, “and we don’t have the time,” he says. “We don’t have 170 years.” 

So MDRI is taking what its leaders call a digital-first approach. That means combining the expertise of materials scientists and chemists with automated equipment for synthesizing chemicals; a nanoprinter for uniting the generation, combination and deposition of nanoparticle catalysts in one automated process for renewable-energy applications; and sensors that collect a wide range of data, including the humidity in a given lab on a given day. All  that is fed into machine-learning models that can accelerate the discovery process.

To supply arid regions with water, Islamoglu is working on porous materials that can draw moisture out of low-humidity air much as a sponge would. The approach is material-agnostic, so the MDRI team is looking for an inexpensive candidate to capture water from the air. The trick lies in finding the right balance of various characteristics: for example, in low-humidity conditions, the pores have to be small enough to capture the water molecules and concentrate them so they can condense. The materials can’t be too hydrophobic—water-repellent—or they won’t collect the moisture. But they can’t hold the water too tightly, either, or they’d require high temperatures (200 to 300 degrees Celsius) to release it, and generating the energy to reach such temperatures would be expensive. 

Because different climates, such as mildly or highly humid regions, often require different porous-material specifications to optimize water harvesting from the air, that’s also an active research area at MDRI. Water shortages are a growing problem, even in the U.S. and Europe, where food production consumes large quantities of fresh water and climate change alters rainfall patterns. A recent United Nations report lists several developed countries that could suffer from water scarcity by 2040. 

Water into fuel  

A slightly different version of the same material could capture carbon dioxide either directly from air or industrial sources; then it could be converted into something harmless or used to produce new petrochemicals without extracting more oil from the ground. For carbon capture, the pore size of a material is less important than its chemical composition, which allows it to interact with and trap the carbon dioxide, Islamoglu says.

Another way to combat carbon emissions is to use hydrogen-fed fuel cells to produce energy. One important component of a hydrogen-based system is the electrolyzer, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. At MDRI, lead scientist Jeff Wu is working to develop better catalysts that make the splitting process more efficient. Existing electrolyzers use rare and expensive precious metals, including platinum and ruthenium. Wu is searching for catalysts that work just as well but are made of cheaper and more abundant metals, such as iron, nickel, or copper.

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