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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
Who is going to provide the guards for these condensers, because you know that the local warlords and privileged will abscond with them as another source of wealth and power. There's more than just buying the equipment, there is maintenance and policing, just to name the obvious manpower needs.
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.
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.
Meh, I also do not think we should have gone to war in Iraq. It is, however, not correct or productive to place the blame on the troops, and since they're over there following orders as best they can, they deserve our respect and the best logistics/support that we can manage to give them.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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