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Wind Turbine Extracts Water From Air
An anonymous reader writes "Getting access to enough water to drink in a desert environment is a pretty tough proposition, but Eole Water may have solved the problem. It has created a wind turbine that can extract up to 1,000 liters of water per day from the air. All it requires is a 15mph wind to generate the 30kW's of power required for the process to happen. The end result is a tank full of purified water ready to drink at the base of each turbine."
dune tech come to life!
Finally, we've developed the technology to colonize Arrakis!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Okay, so windtraps exist. Now to genetically-engineer me a giant worm.
A Slashdot story from 2009 on the same idea. That one wasn't operational at the time, though (except as a research prototype), and this seems to be from a different group.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Now the birds will get dry eyes.
Can you say "windtraps"? Now are we need are some Fremen to operate and maintain them.
Will you need a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators?
Next up, sandtrout and lasguns!
Doesn't that include 0 liters? So they're possibly creating exactly what every rock, stick, and insect in the desert already does?
In case it's not clear, this whole business of "up to x whatevers" is ambiguous. Why don't they just tell us the the criteria involved. Like what different conditions can be expected to supply.
Fix the Atmospheric Condensers.
But I was going down to the Toshi stations to pick up some power converters!!!
So now what we really need is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
Water from the air can still be contaminated with dihydrogen monoxide, a byproduct of combustion, which a lot of factories and power plants give off.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I don't think the vaporators on Tatooine produced power, too. What next? Will someone finally invent the hyperdrive?
Mors superne
Smaller tropical islands are very humid but often don't have enough rainfall to keep an adequate freshwater supply, and as a result use desalination plants.
A turbine like this would work quite well in such an environment.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
...Then the people consuming the electricity can chose to use it to run moisture water condensers, or make electricity for things like running air conditioning?
Or, win/win: Put up wind farms that generate electricity.
Run electricity to dwellings. Have the dwellings run air conditioning systems that also collect condensed water.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Uncle Owen: "What I really need is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators." C-3PO: "Vaporators? Sir, my first job was programming binary load lifters very similar to your vaporators in most respects."
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Maybe this is the paranoid eco-terrorist hippy in me, but I wonder what kind of affect these things would have in already arid desert environments. I imagine that a field of a thousand of these things could seriously affect the local ecosystem, and perhaps the weather in neighboring areas. Though this would be good for Arrakis. Maybe Mars too actually. Now wouldn't that be something. Wouldn't even need to land near the poles to get a little H2O.
Note where they're testing it: Abu Dhabi, a coastal city at the edge of a desert. Current humidity in Abu Dhabi is 51%. The CIA Factbook says the UAE's water situation is a "lack of natural freshwater resources compensated by desalination plants; desertification". That's the ideal site, with both humidity and wind.
Think of this as a form of desalinization. Coastal, or even offshore, windmills producing both power and water.
During the press conference, a prototype full-body suit was also demonstrated. This suit, dubbed a "stillsuit," collects 99% of the moisture a person expels, and distills it into potable water. A company executive described the design while a reporter, who introduced himself only as Paul, was given the opportunity to try it on. The entire staff, who were all present for the press conference, were shocked when the reporter knew precisely how to put it on, without instruction, despite never having seen the complicated contraption prior to the press conference.
So someone hooked up a dehumidifier to a wind turbine and it's news? Sorry I didn't RTFA :-)
... why can't we use that to separate/capture Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules from the air, and then recombine them (with the same energy from the turbines) into pure water? Run it over some rocks to add minerals, and voila - Evian!
I'm pretty sure that the NIMBY crowd are going to remain silent on it, but still... I'm sure that somebody's going to come up with some reason why these shouldn't go up.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This would also be useful for areas such as rural parts of central Texas, where the water table is so low that drilling a reliable well is dicey, the humidity is high, and the wind is fairly constant for most of the year.
For a small farm that tries to be as off-grid as possible, other than the noise factor from windmills, this would be ideal. If the water yield is good enough, it would mean irrigation is taken care of regardless of drought conditions.
I just hope this technology doesn't just fade away as many others have in the past. There is definitely a use for this around the world, as usable fresh water becomes harder and harder to find.
That would be really cool. Thought I imagine the maintenance costs (especially due to corrosion from the salty air and tropical storms) may make it a little less attractive than conventional means.
So a few years ago I met this old retired engineer who explained what he'd been doing in his working life. The one thing he was most proud of was being part of a project where (waaait for it...) turbines that condensed water from the air were installed somewhere in Asia (can't remember exactly where) where drinkable water was hard to come by. Although I applaud this effort, it seems that the concept is hardly novel and similar machines have been used before.
Propeller type windmills are inefficient. He should use a vertically mounted cylider (think three blade squirrel cage) and mount the distiller vertically. It will operate at a greater range of speeds, will always face the wind, and put minimal sheer force on the turbine shaft.
http://xkcd.com/870/
First panel.
Sweet.. Now the technology exist to live in the Tatooine dessert like Luke Skywalker's Aunt and Uncle.
I now can open up my own Lars Moisture Farm.
"As long as an area meets the wind speed requirements this is a completely self contained system"
I'm curious as to what happens if it does not meet the wind speed requirements - does water production cease, and is all generated energy lost? Frequent wind speeds of at least 15 mph are not very common in most small wind turbine installations, so this requirement may significantly limit the locations where this can operate. Of course, this can be improved with more efficient turbine designs, larger capacity turbines, or energy storage systems (batteries and inverters), allowing it to produce water at lower wind speeds and to therefore operate more often. Those solutions would certainly increase cost. Granted, this is still a prototype so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
It look like their solar powered system has batteries and an inverter which would allow for energy storage when power is too low. This would allow for *some* water production at any site which produces *some* power - the rate of production would vary with power, but at least there would not be a minimum power required to produce *any* water.
Either way, the concept sure is cool for remote sites.
I don't get it. Why does it have to heat the air up ("to produce steam") ??
Why can't it just take the air and cool it down, instead of wasting energy for heating?
I'm just trying to thin out some of the Dune and Star Wars comments.
People are building wind turbines at sea at the moment, so corrosion problems are apparently solvable.
Idiot. Moron. Dumbass.
It claims to heat the (hot, desert) air to "produce steam" which is then condensed. The water is already in the air, you don't need to heat it, just cool it to grab the water out.
Either this is a crap article, or its one of those over-unity perpetual motion scams.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The company also makes units that will run off of solar or the grid.
Passionately Indifferent
But if you kill the sandworms, you'll also destroy the spice.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
not very impresive for 2.6GJ of power, i am shure desalination plants do better.
Eole is actually building several models to handle different climates. The Pacific Northwest model is similar to the model pictured, but smaller and in place of the turbine is a large handle. It's just a big bucket.
I don't get it. Why does it have to heat the air up ("to produce steam") ??
Why can't it just take the air and cool it down, instead of wasting energy for heating?
It claims to heat the (hot, desert) air to "produce steam" which is then condensed. The water is already in the air, you don't need to heat it, just cool it to grab the water out.
Either this is a crap article, or its one of those over-unity perpetual motion scams.
To everyone questioning the snake-oil of having to steamify this mysterious water vapour before recondensing it, please keep in mind the following:
I. Just because the water molecule is in the air (via most likely evaporation), it does not imply that the water vapor has a lot of kinetic energy (it's not hot water vapor like steam is). An analogous situation to this is how the water vapor coming out of a kettle can cook your hand, but a muggy day only ruins your hair.
II. Next, we want to consider efficiency. As this article (first link when googling for "steam condense efficiency") http://www.engineersedge.com/heat_exchanger/large_steam_condenser.htm mentions, the laws of thermodynamics dictate that the largest temperature difference is the most efficient for mechanisms such as condensation.
III. -Finally, thermodynamics also dictates two last details about generating temperature differences:
1. That it's much more efficient to cool to a temperature close to ambient (same reason why low-TC superconducting magnets are bathed in multiple blankets of cryo-fluids with different boiling points, rather than just liquid helium blanket and room temperature on the other side),
2. That heat is very cheap and easy to make (often referred to as the "dirtiest" form of energy because it's maximized in entropy).
IV. Put all those things together, and one arrives at the following:
-I want to condense water, and to do it well I need a huge temperature difference between the vapor in the air and my condenser coil.
-It's really hard, costly, and wasteful to make a super good air-conditioner inside a turbine for no reason.
-I'll just heat (remember, it's P=IR heating coil easy!) the water first, and then make a mediocre condenser, and get just the same gains as having a phenomenal condenser.
I've been eyeballing various types of dehumidifiers for some time now, as the groundwater looks like it will eventually become unusable. Another thing to consider with these devices is air pollution. This device apparently purifies the water before delivering it to the storage tank, but place something like this near an industrialized area, and you're going to be squeezing a lot of shit out of the air with the water.
FWIW, Water from Air machines have been available for decades
here's one http://www.islandsky.com/
Just add wind generator
Can anybody make any sense of this passage from TFA?
Air is drawn in through vents in the nose of the turbine and a generator heats it producing steam. That steam is then fed through a cooling compressor to form moisture that gets condensed into water.
Produce steam by heating air? I thought you got steam buy heating water. And what the hell is a cooling compressor. Doesn't air heat as it is compressed?
OK, I got the sarcasm out of the way. But really, I'd like to know how this really works and the articles explanation strikes me a pretty garbled. What is accomplished by heating the air, only to cool it? Or is the air really heated as it is compressed, then gets cooled under compression (in the heat exchanger) so that when it goes though an expansion valve the cooling effect results in condensation of the humidity?
I'm sure this device works fine but the poor explanation by a "science journalist" leaves a lot to the imagination.
These devices will remove the most powerful greenhouse gas, water vapor, and will result in Global Cooling. Stop them before we have another ice age!
The issue with many desalination plants is not the disposal of salts/minerals but keeping the system clean from all those salts/minerals. The issue being that salts/minerals have a tenancy to build up inside the pipes causing the system to need lots of maintenance.
Doctor Flamond: You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process so revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?
Nick Rivers: Wow! They'd have enough salt to last forever!
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
It's a prototype so the cost is currently shitloads per megalitre, but once a production line is set up to make them it could be buggerall per megalitre. As should be completely obvious the production line isn't designed yet so a cost estimate can vary incredibly wildly depending on a huge number of factors - but I'm sure you've thought of that, know it's too early to put a cost on it and are just exploiting that to make the idea appear worthless to the gullible.
If not, I apologise in advance and hope you now understand that costing of mass produced products is not instantly obvious for new techologies.
As far as I can tell, it's an Atmospheric Water Generator", of which many designs have been developed. Hooked up to a wind turbine. So, the next question...
Suppose instead of using your wind generator to make water, you tap it and sell the electricity. Would it be cheaper to use the earnings from your electricity sales and buy water (say, from someone running a more efficient AWG, doing desalinization, or piping it in from a remote source), vs running the machine directly?
Or, to flip it around, would it be cheaper just to run the condensing portion of this machine, using purchased electricity -- and skip the wind turbine entirely? While your wind is "free", if you take the dollar amount you'd spend on purchased electricity (over a period equal to the lifespan of the turbine) vs the capital cost and maintenance of the turbine), do you spend less or more? Keep in mind that costs paid up front are worth "more" than periodic payments, since you are paying an opportunity cost when you could be investing that capital elsewhere.
These things always look great but the maintenance costs are insane.
I live in california and we've been building wind farms since the 70s. Practically all of them are abandoned now. We keep building them... and abandoning them. They get enough money or loans to build the farm. They farm operates for five years and then shuts down. Leaving yet another forest of rusting windmills in the desert.
Understand, I'd be all for this if I weren't sure it would depreciate in about six seconds flat. But that has been our experience with wind power. You have to basically replace the whole farm every five to ten years which at any rational energy price is unsustainable. Possibly it would work if the farm itself had the ability to manufacture the turbines but since they all seem to come out of Germany the replacement costs are very high.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I welcome our new windy overlords. . .
No, wait. That's not it.
I would be interested in one of these, both because I want to grow more things than our water rates allow, and because our air has gotten wet over the last twenty years.
If I could have 250/gallons a day in the summer for $5k, I'd snap it up.
hawk
Cripes, I hate that! "25 times cheaper than X" means endig up with -24X. Yes, *negative twenty-four*. This is as bad as people stating that doubling something is a 200% increase. No, it's not, it's a 100% increase. What you mean to say is 1/25th of the cost.
End rant.
Sounds like a great investment for the gas lobby, after they frack your water and make it undrinkable they will sell you one of these.
Wind cost-efficacy is subject to significant economies of scale from size (increases energy capture from larger rotors and higher hub heights outweigh increases in capital costs from larger/more robust support structures)--I would not be surprised to see similar scaling from water condensing equipment. The bottom line is that for the mass extraction of water from air it makes more sense to build utility scale wind farms of (relatively, $ per kW) cheaper 1.5+ MW turbines to run relatively cheaper, but much larger water condensers than it is to make some flashy, small, and inefficient combo-device. But, it could work for remote locations without the infrastructure to support utility scale deployment. But, in that case, the infrastructure for proper maintenance is probably lacking too.
IIRC there was evidence that there is trace amounts of water in Mars' atmosphere. Perhaps this condensation windmill could be used to get water there too? If there's any decent amount of wind too year around, could hit both power and water problems at the same time.
Someone asked how the water production rate depends on air humidity. Here is a link to the datasheet of the WMS1000 from their website.
Depending on the available power the production rate drops to 350-550 liters/day in desert area with average relative air humidity of 30-35%.
There is also a neat picture of its internal components.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)
I saw this already i think 2 years ago over here : http://dutchrainmaker.nl/
Uncle Owen?!
Scaled down, this could be useful in ocean-crossing sailboats, where drinking water is always an issue. Such boats tend to operate in windy conditions, at sea level where air humidity must be sufficient.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to buy a 30 KW generator?
So removing water from the atmosphere reduces the greenhouse effect, if you believe in that sort of thing.
No need for government to get involved at all, since the water produced pays for the technology (eventually).
The killer on wind turbines is storage. You can't keep electricity very easily, which means on windless days everything stops. As a windless region can be several hundred miles (certainly bigger than the UK) you need a stupidly big power grid to overcome it. Or fossil fuel backups, which you have to keep ready at all times, which means they burn some fuel all the time, which negates most of the point of having the things at all.
The output of these, however, is water. Which is rather easy to store for a week or two!