Capturing water from the air efficiently: this is the core of the AQUAFRAME project developed by an international research team that includes Paola D'Angelo, professor of Physical Chemistry at Sapienza University, and Omar Yaghi, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Distributed capture of water from the atmosphere using sustainable materials is an innovative approach that promises great results in tackling and resolving the water emergency that the earth has been facing in recent decades.

This process uses metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are crystalline materials with extremely high porosity: they consist of metal atoms connected to each other through organic molecules that have the ability to absorb significant amounts of gaseous molecules such as water or carbon dioxide, which can then be released in a controlled manner. With their unprecedented porosity and chemical adaptability, MOFs have recently proven to be ideal candidates for collecting atmospheric water under real conditions. However, the water collection systems developed so far have some disadvantages, including high energy consumption and low water productivity in non-temperate climates.

In this context, AQUAFRAME aims to develop and characterise innovative MOFs with optimal characteristics for capturing water from the atmosphere, using experiments at synchrotron facilities and artificial intelligence methods: through particle accelerators capable of generating extremely high-intensity X-rays, it will be possible to acquire information at the molecular level on how disorder influences the water absorption of MOFs, paving the way for the design of new-generation water collection systems that exceed current performance records.

Paola D'Angelo is Full Professor of Physical Chemistry at Sapienza University, Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced Studies (SSAS) and President of SILS (Italian Synchrotron Light Society). Francesco Tavani was an SSAS student in the Science and Technology class from 2014 to 2019. In 2023, he obtained a PhD in Chemical Sciences at Sapienza under the supervision of Paola D'Angelo. Currently a research fellow at Sapienza, he is conducting a period of research under the joint supervision of Omar Yaghi and Paola D'Angelo at The Regents of the University of California research centre in Berkeley, California.