It seems like every other year someone is hawking some fancy device to pull water from thin air. Usually it is a peltier device or some thing similarly inefficient.
This at least is a different method, but color me skeptical it will have real world implications.
Cellulose is a component of almost all plant material. Konjac gum is also a plant-derived material. Assuming that there isn’t some complicated processing required, they have low carbon footprint.
Water-wasting Fremen: “I piss on windtraps!”
Yes, there will be problems scaling this up from lab tests with tiny samples, to their hoped 13L of water in real conditions.
Gel or not, they’re doing a water phase change from vapor to liquid, and that dumps lots of energy!
Meanwhile, their gel apparently turns hydrophobic on “gentle heating”.
Those are contradictory.
Take a look at figure 4 for scale (it won’t onebox). They have a fairly large condenser and heating element and are extracting less than 1 ml of water per cycle. The gel might be a really cool idea but scaling it up the thousand-fold needed to become practical won’t be easy (or likely).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30505-2/figures/4
screenshot of device with ~1 g of gel:
This is a about a different group, but is the exact same thing.
Again and again and again and again.
Desiccant dehumidifiers don’t work at scale.
That’s a Peltier device, isn’t it?
Seriously. They are very high energy intensive in high humidity environments, and work even worse in low humidity environments.
High energy intensive might be ok with a certain combination of solar panels for a fixed location. I can see a niche application for something like this in certain deserts.
“Gentle” in this case seems to refer to the temperature rather than the total amount of energy input into the system. It is heated to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t see any notes on how many kWh it takes to extract a liter or anything like that. But maybe the thought is that in desert environments it’s not too hard to heat something to 140 degrees with relatively simple equipment.
What about re-use? I can’t see in the article any mention of whether this is a reusable product, or if we’re going to have another plastic grocery bag fiasco. 
The source article is almost completely about re-use, talking about the number of cycles per day…
But the problem is the amount of power it takes, which is staggering. It is EXPENSIVE water.
That isn’t in the article, but it is a thermodynamics problem - water phase changes take energy, and there is no way around that.
In a desert environment you can heat something to 140 degrees Fahrenheit pretty easily with a solar oven, no need for fancy energy-intensive heaters.
How do you get it back down to 60 after that, to run the 25 cycles per day it takes to reach these water quantities?
Edit: I’m an idiot - 60 degrees is the high value (metric vs “standard”), going back to the article to get the low value.
It looks like they’re not holding anything back here, this is the original paper.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30505-2
There’s no mention of the words “propietary” or “patent”.
You RTFA, found your mistake and admitted your mistake, three signs you’re not an idiot.
25 Celsius, or 77 degrees Fahrenheit for the low.
So, the question is how do you lower the temperature to 77f and raise it to 140f “14-24 timers per day in arid environments”
Again, a LOT of energy. It’s been tried, time and again at scale, and it doesn’t work, because there is no way around the energy requirements.
No surprises here, but Herbert was pretty heavily influenced by some pretty ancient technology in Iran: yakhchāl and wind catchers, which are becoming a thing again.
