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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."
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.
Will you need a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators?
Fix the Atmospheric Condensers.
But I was going down to the Toshi stations to pick up some power converters!!!
If you read the article you will see that an operational unit is already producing 800 liters a day consistently. I love this stuff, the energy and raw materials to sustain the human race are all around us, just waiting for the right technique to take advantage of them.
Soooo, that's arid area and probably fresh water shortages licked, what's up next.
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.
It requires 15mph wind at least, and the up to likely depends on air humidity (which is plentiful in coastal places like Dubai).
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
A prototype unit was constructed and erected in Abu Dhabi 6 months ago and has consistently produced up to 800 liters of water a day.
other sites say that production was between 500 to 800L. six months ago was october, which has mean precipitation 0.4" there.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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?
At 800 liters a day I'm wondering how many of these can operate without severely upsetting the desert ecosystem. If they're sucking out moister in the day, how much moisture will remain in the air to condense during the night for wildlife?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
...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.
I'd say it has about as much effect as wind turbines do on the wind, ie not much. Its only sucking moisture out of a very, very tiny level of the atmosphere, and only a very tiny cross-section of that. They just won't have any appreciable effect, no matter how many of them you install.
Many deserts are also relatively humid.
Remember that deserts are defined by precipitation, not humidity. Deserts next to coastal areas lacking sufficient mountains to extract the humidity (such as Abu Dabi, referenced in TFA) are prime candidates.
This wouldn't work nearly as well in, say, Phoenix Arizona which is not only a desert, but is also arid and dry in every sense of the word.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Well since wind turbines are a grand per kilowatt to install, lets say $50,000 install costs for 500 to 1000L per day, with reasonable maintenance. How long would it take to pay for itself at current desal costs, since over the first year it comes to 27 cents a liter?
Whew quick update - a tenth of a cent per liter would be the target
http://www.canadianclear.com/desalination.html
so it would have to be running ~150 years to equal that kind of throughput. With that said there are plenty of places it would be useful which are not accessable to desal tech without major infrastructure investment, so I can see value, while it's not the answer to all questions on fresh water.
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.
You haven't been here in July or August, have you? Dewpoints are generally between 50 and 65 degrees F during those months (although, with an outdoor air temperature of 110F, the relative humidity is still low). Currently, we have a relative humidity of 9%, and a dewpoint of 25F, so it's pretty dry, but an evaporator operating below 25F will still condense water...
And the worms ate into his brain.
no matter how many of them you install
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible
One has to wonder about the impact of several million of these, though. - One car doesn't do much polluting, but Los Angeles sure does have a lot of smog.
This type of technology never goes to anybody who can actually use it.
Huh? Who says oil sheiks don't need a Beverly Hills style swimming pool?
But what about the 2? Is there enough 2 in the Martian atmosphere??
/* No Comment */
As far C-3PO knows, the binary load lifters story is true. Shortly after the conclusion of Episode III, C-3PO contracted the Tyrell Corporation to wipe its memory banks and implant the memories of another robot. C-3PO effectively has no recollection of Episodes I, II, or III. Lucky bastard.
But if you kill the sandworms, you'll also destroy the spice.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
why? What the fuck makes getting out more valuable? cause YOU like it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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'd say once you start factoring in the cost of pipelines and pumps from the coast it gets a lot closer to parity, especially when you're talking about many remote and dispersed communities. With this tech you just drop a unit anywhere and there's your water.
No, they've invented vaporators.
The problem will be finding translator droids who speak Bocce.
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."
And he was all like: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." And then he got a job programming Binary Load Filters.
I'd say once you start factoring in the cost of pipelines and pumps from the coast it gets a lot closer to parity, especially when you're talking about many remote and dispersed communities. With this tech you just drop a unit anywhere and there's your water.
Very true... and another advantage for this idea is that it's defensible. The problem with pipelines is they stretch for miles through the wilderness, and some people have an annoying tendency to sabotage or tap into them. The windmill, on the other hand, is easier to guard because it's all in one spot.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You shoot small animals for fun? That's the first indicator of a serial killer, you freak!
No pollution in LA is entirely an artifact of what comes out of exhaust pipes, just because it can blow somewhere else doesn't mean it's no longer pollution.
Most of it will be returned to the ecosystem anyway. It's not like the water will be stored forever. It will likely be used very quickly and very close to the source of collection. It will be used to either grow plants, or hydrate humans or animals. Either way, it will end up being evaporated back into the atmosphere and there will be no net change in the long term.