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Creating Water from Thin Air
Iphtashu Fitz writes "In order to provide the U.S. Military with water in places like Iraq, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave millions of dollars in research funding to companies like LexCarb and Sciperio to try to extract water from the air. Amazingly, a company that DARPA didn't fund, Aqua Sciences, beat them all to the punch by developing a machine that can extract up to 600 gallons of water a day from thin air even in locations like arid deserts. The 20 foot machine does this without using or producing toxic materials or byproducts. The CEO of Aqua Sciences declined to elaborate on how the machine works, but said it is based on the natural process by which salt absorbs water."
What, you're shocked that all the government funded plodders were out done by a Capitalist independent? Government is very poor at creation and is typically very poor at selecting future winners in the technology race. That's why government should be a consumer of technology rather than a producer of the same.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
If this technology really works as well as is advertised, how bout the government does something with it a bit more productive than sending a bunch to the army? Like maybe buying thousands of these things and shipping them to many of the different places in the world where a lack access to fresh water is one of the most pressing health concerns of millions of people.
It's good that our soldiers are out in the middle east doing their jobs, and they deserve fresh water too. But seeing the general anger towards the US that's prevelant in so much of the world right now, actually helping people with something like this would generate tremendous good will. It'd probably be a lot cheaper than our wars are as well.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Now I just need a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators. Oh sorry, I thought every comment was supposed to have that joke in it.
sucking all the moisture out of the environment will have no impact on the eco system, right?
Pretty much, since you pretty much put it right back in. That's why you need so much of it in the desert. And why there's so little eco system there to damage.
How much water gets used up when you flush a toilet? That's right. None. There's no water shortage, it's a question of purity and distribution, not quantity.
KFG
Yet further down
Anybody with half a brain knows that there has to be some humidity in the air in order to extract water. Wait, that explains it.
While it is an accomplishment to reduce the humidity requirement, it doe not eliminate it. Indeed given their claim of up to 600 gal/day I'd say that at the minimum required humidity of 14%, it is possible that they may require far more of them than is talked about. A key factor is how rapidly that output drops when the humidity levels drop. if it porduces 600 gal/day at optimum humidity levels, it may only put out say 10 gal/day. If that were the case you could not rely on this for troop support in such areas. A supplemental, sure.
Depending on the size and maintenance requirements, as well as the phsyical inputs other than air, it may not be cost effective to use these in more arid regions. Now, places like the southern US they would be quite useful.
What I'd like to know is the size and power requirements. Something like this could be quite useful in high-rise buildings. Pumping water to the upper levels requires a significant amount of power. If instead we could put a few of these on tops of buildings and use them to bring water down, we might see a net win in terms of supply and energy usage. Imagine places like Phoenix or Las Vegas.
Pheonix has an average daily humidity of about 55% IIRC. Thus it would stand to reason that these units could pump out their maximum output. Depending on their size and power requirements, several of these atop an office building in Phoenix could produce several thousand gallons per building. As office buildings their water requirements might be low enough to satisfy with these units. They would have the further advantage of dehumidifying the hot air of Phoenix, thus possibly resulting in a slight cooling load reduction.
Even small residential units could be tremendously benefited. The average person requires 125 gal/day. Thus one of these could supply the water needs (not counting grass lawns) of a family of four in Phoenix. If the house is designed with greywater and systems for landscaping purposes it is possible that one of these could fully supply the average water requirement of a family of four in Phoenix. Which leads to the question
Anyone from Phoneix care to share how much you pay for water? If you've got a spouse and a pair of kids, and this unit eliminated your water usage bill (there would still be sewage), how much would it save you per year?
40,000 of these units in Phoenix would drop the summer daily demand for water by 24Mgal/day, or 5-12% depending on the season (Summer to Winter).
Essentially, if this proved cost effective then the more arid parts of the country might be able to make large savings on their infrastructure and supply costs. Which would be yet another miltary requested technology applied to positive civilian use.
The next question is: does it scale up and down? Can it be scaled down to be an effective one-person supply? Do larger units demonstrate a better-than-linear increase in water production?
Combine this with greywater systems, solar thermal heating (water and home), and appropriate landscaping and we would be a long ways toward a more sustainable system - without major changes and reductions to our standard of living.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Historically the government has been a great catalyst of techology inovation and improvements."
True. They make great contributions, using other people's money, aquired by force or the threat of force, and spent very wastefully. But when you can tax who cares about efficiency?
Government is very poor at creation and is typically very poor at selecting future winners in the technology race.
See also the Internet you're using to post your comment. Oh wait, DARPA created that, nevermind.
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Of course it has a shelf life. Over time bacteria could potentially grow in your bottled water. Bottling methods aren't 100% sterile, nor do they maintain their seal until the end of the universe. Hence you assign everything meant for human consumption a shelf life based on some extremely conservative estimate of how long the product is likely to remain uncontaminated under "normal" storage conditions.
Besides, a recipe isn't just ingredients, but also the process, which can be equally important. Think about wine: "Ingredients: grapes."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yep. Star Wars, the story of a poor kid on Arakkis who grew up and went to Trantor. But movies and TV series routinely rip off whatever they can, tweaking it just enough to (usually) avoid lawsuits.
Not to say that science fiction (and other) writers don't rip off too, but they're usually much better at filing off the serial numbers, and taking from totally different genres (as well as being long since in the public domain). Asimov's inspiration for the Foundation Trilogy (back when it was a trilogy) was, loosely speaking, "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire". Forbidden Planet was loosely based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (and of course Star Trek ripped off a lot from Forbidden Planet). And so on.
(In fact Hollywood is often closer to the original when they rip something off than they are when they buy the property and make a movie from it. Joke. Joke.)
-- Alastair
Water out of thin air? I'm not impressed. Every morning when I leave for work I need to wipe off the windshields of my car as there is so much water on it without any rain happening. Bought the dang thing to get from point A to point B and it's always producing water. I'll bet if we parked it into a desert an oasis would form!
Why not? Well (1) they were hiding their numbers from the Padishah emperor and the Harkonnens (2) they needed all their money to bribe the spacing guild to hide their numbers (3) it was unthinkable to imperil spice production (4) waterbombing Arrakis would quickly kill off the spice and the worms (5) the guild navigators would see this quite clearly in advance, and turn against them (6) they'd lose the addictive spice, worms as transport, Shai-hulud, and the impenetrable defensive wall of the desert. Plus they were, when it came down to it, tribal semi-savages, and more used to persistence than immediacy.