Investigating the Effect of Low-Frequency Sound in Enhancing the Efficiency of Water Generation in TEAWGs

Overview

MOTIVATION / PROBLEM: Access to water is a global issue that affects over four billion people. A lack of water-related infrastructure further worsens this issue. However, AWGs (Atmospheric Water Generators) help address this issue by acting as long-term infrastructure that can extract moisture from the atmosphere to generate water. Because current AWGs have sub-optimal harvest rates, this project investigates whether low-frequency sound can increase the water generation in AWGs. ENGINEERING GOAL: The goal is to design and test a custom modification to a self-built AWG that uses low-frequency sound to increase water generation by at least 15%, relative to the baseline. APPROACH: I designed and built a custom, Peltier-based AWG. I conducted five four-hour tests, both with and without low-frequency sound. I measured the water yield in grams, and to maintain consistency, kept temperature, relative-humidity, and location constant. RESULTS: The results far exceeded the original 15% goal as the use of low-frequency sound led to a 117% increase in water generation. The analysis yielded a p-value of 0.0115, indicating a probability of less than 1.5% that the improvement was due to random fluctuations rather than the low-frequency sound. CONCLUSION: This scientific investigation confirms that the pairing of low-frequency sound with AWGs can significantly increase water generation. This works by forcing smaller droplets to coalesce and gravitational forces to overcome adhesion. These findings show how current water yields could be doubled, leading to increased scalability and sustainability of AWGs, helping reduce global water scarcity significantly.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Environmental Engineering (Track 2) (Junior Division) · Entry J-12-19

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