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Creating Water from Thin Air

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the droid-that-understands-the-binary-language-of-moisture-vaporators dept.

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."

7 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Good! by thefirelane · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So the government failed to fund a company who promised unbelievable results with no byproducts while not supplying any details? I must say, I'm actually proud of them. Glad to see tax dollars aren't being wasted on Vaporware

  2. Frank Herbert was prescient by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was thinking of Dune myself. Frank Herbert's notion that man could survive with such limited water supplies apparently wasn't entirely fantastical. However, IIRC no such device was used in the series. Instead, the Fremen relied on farming the naturally forming dew of the planet. Personally, after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, I wonder why Herbert never thought of having some Fremen just crash a few comets into the planet to at least provide some selected portion of it with water. Of course, that would have killed off all the sandworms.

  3. Some points to consider... by Rockinsockindune · · Score: 2, Interesting
    To make this work and be cost effective in reality these things have to continue to be cheap to run. A few things the article doesn't mention are:
    1. Does it require electricity, if so how much?
    2. Do the chemicals used in the condensation need to be replenished? If so, how often, how much potable water can be generated per load of chemicals, what is the cost of the chemicals?
    --
    I abuse commas, I cannot help myself.
  4. Lithium [Chloride|Bromide], probably by comingstorm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It sucks the moisture out of the air, then you heat it up and evaporate the water, leaving the salts behind to be reused.

    The great thing about is, all you need is a heat source. You can either burn fuel, or use waste heat coming off a turbine, or even use solar energy -- you need temperatures above boiling, but not too much higher.

    This is the same stuff they use for solar-powered heat pumps, except there they use a closed loop system, and evaporate the water at low pressure to get air conditioning.

  5. Re:Linky link by asolipsist · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This sounds like a good mythbusters experiment. Do adam and jamie read slashdot?

  6. Can I get a shoutout from all the foodies? by jjohn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the article:
    "We figured out how to tap it in a very unique and proprietary way," Sher said. "We figured out how to mimic nature, using natural salt to extract water and act as a natural decontamination.

    "Think of the Dead Sea, where nothing grows around it because the salt dehydrates everything. It's kind of like that."

    All the Alton Brown geeks in the house should have perked up their ears when they read that. Salt is hydroscopic; it attracts water. Sugar is also hydroscopic, but salt is much cheaper (especially if you don't need food-grade salt).

    There are two ways salt is harvested by humans: evaporation and mining.

    I can see using salt to grab the moisture in the air present in the pre-dawn skies, but I don't rightly know how to make the salt give it back up. I assume they just cook the rocks and capture the steam. Salt, being a rock, can be heated lots of times before degrading.

    I imagine a process like this would produce fairly clean water.

    Give up for Food Science! Hell ya!

  7. Damp Rid? by fozzy1015 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The quote reminds me of my younger years when I had to... um... quickly dry things I grew before they rotted.

    Take a tupperware container. Wedge two layers of chicken wire, with a few inches between the bottom, middle, and top. On the bottom layer of wire
    put a cotton cloth with Damp Rid(Potassium Chloride). Put the items you want to dehydrate on the top layer. Seal up. The salt will leech the water out and
    when it saturates, dump it at the bottom of the container.

    So given a big enough contraption to hold enough salt with a large enough surface area, a way to move enough air over it(fan), and a way to get the water out and stored(pump), could you
    collect 600 gallons of a water a day in a desert?