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Water Bottle Fills Itself From the Air
mbstone writes "The Namib Desert Beetle generates water from water vapor via its shell, which has alternating hydrophilic and hydrophobic bumps which channel water droplets into its mouth. Scientists at MIT developed a self-filling water bottle using this technology, and have announced a contest for the best design of a countertop water-from-air generator."
stuff like this we're gonna need to stave off the water riots coming to a decade near you.
I'm not hydrophobic, I have gay friends!
You know what they say, the bottle is half empty for pessimists and 1 year away from being full for an optimist.
NBD Nano co-founder Deckard Sorensen wants this green technology available in all walks of life; installing it on people, cars, homes and anything else you can imagine.
Next stop stillsuits.
Now we know what Luke Skywalker was repairing.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The guy looks like he catches water out of the air with his teeth.
Sounds like vaporware to me.
Do the math... That's like 100mL per hour for a water bottle size. That's actually pretty impressive!
FTA: In the near future, it looks as if we’ll have water bottles that can capture drinkable water from the air as well.
Perl Programmer for hire
The correct Dune reference is, of course, the windtrap.
TFA
NBD Nano co-founder Deckard Sorensen wants this green technology available in all walks of life; installing it on people, cars, homes and anything else you can imagine.
Desert beetles be damn'd, let's steal their water, we have a contest to win.
(exaggerating due to a dark mood)...
Now if we can just combine this invention with the water-powered car...
"Now I will steal all the water from the clouds in Iran so they will blame the United States and start a massive war MUHAHAHAHA!"
Wasting my breath I know...
but machines which extract water from air have been around for a long time.
Even a humble air-conditioner does this (albeit rather inefficiently)
Google on "Air Water Machine"
How much bacteria and mold will this thing accumulate? Better flood it with UV lights
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Genetically engineer this process straight into the body.
Or maybe market it. I'm not good at prioritizing steps.
Sig: I stole this sig.
The Namid Desert Beatle is a badass, of that there can be no doubt; but it also exists in a highly peculiar environment: practically zero precipitation; but fairly reliable daily fog rolling in, available to be collected. In an environment where the peaks and valleys of ambient humidity are less dramatic, and it either just rains fairly frequently, or is dry all the time, its extremely clever surface structure would be for nothing.
How much of the world actually encounters regular airborne water but virtually no usable rain?
I did. It's roughly 0.7mL per hour for a 710mL coke bottle; takes around 40 days to fill it up.
Water has a specific heat vaporisation of 2260kJ/kg. So can we make a slow working refrigerator without the need for a compressor from this?
Unicode in Slashdot
Just in time for the return policies in most places to run out, sounds about right.
Now one of those I want.
I'll just stick with my stillsuit thank you very much.
Windtraps could also work using condensation techniques like refrigeration, or a regenerative moisture absorber. Of course, those techniques require power.
So does this device. From the article: "The self-filling bottle can operate using a battery or solar cell to collect and filter the water."
OTOH, my roof could easily collect more water than I use in a day.
50% or 50% empty is a misnomer. Let an engineer look at it, and he'll show you an over-engineered bottle!
50% or 50% empty is a misnomer. Let an engineer look at it, and he'll show you an over-engineered bottle!
And I'll show you there's room for Vodka. Engineers need to party more.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
prolly the best way is to use a badly insulated air-conditioner.
but if you have "dirty water" -or- "salty water you can try this:
you need
1) teflon coated pot from a rice cooker (*)
2) shot-glass (thick, small glass)
3) cling wrap
4) a small stone
put some dirty water in the rice-cooker-bowl, 2 cm maybe.
stand the shot-glass in the middle of bowl
cover the rice-bowl with cling wrap "airtight"
put the small stone on the cling crap, so that the shot-glass is
underneath.
but he whole contraption in the sun.
wait a few hours.
enjoy your "shot" of clean water : )
(*) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_cooker
Make one that does whisky and I'm sold.
And during that year the physicist very slowly ducks!
Scientists study newly identified problems living in a combustible atmosphere
http://clairembelcher.carbonmade.com/projects/2693627#1
Self-milking cows can't be far away.
Table-ized A.I.
I see usefulness of this invention beyond outdoors and space habitat life-support applications: Main greenhouse gas is not CO2, it's water vapor. If we could extract humidity from the atmosphere on a large scale without spending excessive amounts of energy, we could control greenhouse effect on Earth. Furthermore, if we would use thus obtained water for all our needs, instead of using already liquid water from environment, that would also reduce evaporation rate, further reducing atmospheric humidity . Last but not least, forced condensation without cooling has warming effect - this new material could be used as low-temperature heat source for heating in moderate climate belts when winters are mild and temperatures are a few degrees above water freezing.
50% or 50% empty is a misnomer. Let an engineer look at it, and he'll show you an over-engineered bottle!
I am an engineer and I say that it depends on the direction. While filling up the bottle is half full, while drinking it is half empty.
Now we can colonize Tatooine!
Your math is off. I don't have a 710ml bottle handy, so I did a 12oz can.
Assuming 6.5cm * 12cm, ignoring the bottom and top surfaces, just the sides of the cylinder, I get 490 cm2, which is .049 m2.
3l * .049 = 0.147; 147ml/h. The can will be a 40% full in an hour, in 75% RH.
I assume the performance in drier conditions is much worse, though.
Although, once the liquid is in the container, it loses surface area? I didnt bother reading to find out whether the inside or outside or both count. math was assuming one side.. If it is the inside surface that does the work, the increasingly covered surface will give reduced efficiency as it approaches full...
shit, 2pi r h, not 2 pi d h.
so it should be 244cm2, .024m2, producing 73ml/h. Still respectable.
Okay thats the vaporisers sorted, now for the landspeeder!
70% of my friends are water!
Dilute vodka with 50% water???
In Soviet Russia, vodka dilutes YOU.
The BeetleJuice Law Firm on behalf of AngryBeetle Inc. today launched a patent infringement suit against MIT. Their statement reads: It might be very well that MIT has developed something clever, but this is clearly an infringement of AngryBeetle Inc.'s patented water production method. The fact that you can help millions of people is irrelevant - we want our cash now!.... AngryBeetle Inc. and BeetleJuice Law Partners - have not been available for any further comments. Thanks to Alex for inspiration ;)
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
It kills!
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Dang!
do you really think that us geeks sit up half the night thinking of funny remarks to the slashdot articles just so you can steal them over a phone conversation!!
I am filing a suit for infringing on my funny "desert beetle files lawsuit"-piece
-Alex
NB! as for the law suit I think that MIT should liquidize their assets before the beetle gets its moist tentacles on them..
The maths I have says a 710 ml coke bottle should be (we don't have them here, so I'm estimating), about 7cm across and 20cm tall. That would make it's surface area roughly 439 square cm. So you would get 3L * 0.439 = 1.3 litres per hour out of that... It can fill itself in half an hour at 75% humidity. Pretty bloody impressive.
Uhh, I missed a 0 in the conversion to m square... still, 0.13 litres per hour. It'll take about 5 hours to fill, which is pretty good – it means a marathon runner carrying a 710ml bottle will actually have a litre to drink in the race.
If the performance numbers are really this good and you can run it off a reasonably sized solar cell, seems this would be great for hiking. Its no fun having to carry a large quantity of water, even relatively wet climates like the eastern US sometimes good water sources are farther apart than you'd like. That was my experience when I did the AT anyway.
I generally found I needed to carry 3 liters of water to not be thirsty between convenient opportunities to acquire more on hotter days. These were usually humid days when this thing would perform better too, as the water loss was from perspiration which you did more of because its less effective cooling the more humid it gets.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
These funny green thingies poking out of the ground seem to accumulate moisture from thin air every morning.
More evidence of visitation by technologically superior extraterrestrials?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
What about a fractal surface (like your colon) to drastically increase the surface with the same volume?
What about a fractal surface (like your colon) to drastically increase the surface for the same volume?
How much is this "water" going to sell for once they have enough to bottle it?
-- http://www.doczayus.com/
All of these calculations assume that the air, once the water is absorbed out of it, will flow out of the vessel and be replaced by humid air again at the optimal speed. It also requires power to operate. It may be that the power is used to pump the air which would mean the system has only one of these drawbacks, but the article is light on details so I can't be sure. It is also not a system that can be built at home. On the other hand I read an article by an engineer a few years ago that proposed a system that used piping running below the ground to cool the air and cause condensation, using a wind catcher at one end to push it through. His estimates included air flow and showed that a 10 meter long system could provide drinking water in desert air with a moderate wind for several people. I am unable to find the article again unfortunately.
My point is that a temperature gradient is far cheaper and available to poor third world desert countries where such a system is required. This technology is neat but not all that practical. Still a combination of the two systems, ie. lining the inside of underground pipes with this substance and letting the wind push air through might have a much higher rate of condensation and could be used for commercial and military operations in the desert.
This tech sounds very useful to replace wasteful dehumidifiers. A lot less energy and materials required.
Well, damn... while glancing over the headlines, I somehow got it in my mind this was a Black Friday deal, and was about to avoid it.
In the manner of declaring a Godwin, I call Poe!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
shockingly enough, so does my greenhouse.
Particularly of late, where we've had about a foot of rain in 72 hours, my water buttes are all full to the brim
This. Not spam, just demonstrating that the tech is already out there.
I've got a home built one that uses a Peltier heat pump and a solar pile (OK it only works during the day), it pulls in 3 pints a day of pure immediately potable water. Makes the best coffee. ;)
And now imagine instead of being a bottle, it's a dense matrix made to maximize surface area and fresh air is pushed through with a solar-powered fan to accelerate the "condensation." Sort of like an evaporative cooling chiller in reverse. It could be really useful in humid tropical areas and a good alternative to desalination plants.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Not necessarily. You could be drinking it and say it's *still* half full.
Likewise when filling, you could say it's *still* half empty.
So still reverses polarity, or something?
Spoilers
Just throw the bottle at Orat as he is chasing you. He will swallow it and explode from all the water generated is situ.
Veramocor
Pfft, I heard about this first on Cougar Town.
Did it look like this could be inexpensively produced? Changing weather patterns threaten some watersheds; Install at some Headwaters, to soften the ecologic collapse.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
...and just think of all the airborne pollutants, fungus spores, etc, which will accumulate in that water that's slowly being drawn from the air.
How is this more effective than drinking your own urine and urinating again and so on...?
n/t
The material wicks sweat into tubes with one way valves. Normal walking motion compresses the tubes causing the system to act as a pump.
I use that function of my exocrine system for thermal diffusion, I believe the system you describe might require some magical properties in order to work
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I can both breath and extract water from the air.
What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
This is yet another small drop in the bucket, if you'll pardon the pun, in the argument for privatization of water services.
As libertarians predicted decades ago, there are many ways to extract / clean / deliver water for various regions. As with solar panels, your typical middle-class home that is located in a desert region may soon have one of those gizmos (on the roof? walls? etc) to replenish at least a part of its water usage. Perhaps much more significantly, progress is being made in underground water pumping technologies, water desalination, filtering, etc. Better mechanical tech / robotics mean cheaper underground pipes. Self-driving cars mean cheaper water delivery by truck to remote areas. Reduced energy costs will be the ultimate force multiplier, driving the cost of water ever-lower. The market will decide which method works best for each particular place. With competition and other incentives for innovation, prices go down while quality and convenience goes up.
Throughout the 20th century, the great enemy of progress has come from government monopolies, which care very little for efficiency and innovation. Why would they - they can steal your money whether you like their services or not! This resulted in water services being subject to the same homogenization, stagnation, and corruption that is always associated with government services. I'm not necessarily against fluoride, but it's one of many examples of the government thuggery. You simply have no choice of where your water comes from and what its treatment methods and additives are!
All claims of a "natural monopoly" become self-fulfilling prophecies - advances in technology, which government stifles, always lead to alternatives. Some things can be chosen on an individual level, while others come with your choice of apartment building, neighborhood, city, etc. This applies to water infrastructure as it does to roads, telecommunications, sewage, trash removal, electricity, and whatever else. While there is some local governance, the trend is always for more homogenization, collusion, and top-down federal control - one big empire "from sea to shining sea"!
Price mechanisms applied to water would also result in smarter geographic choices, incentives for efficiency, and technologies for local water filtering / recycling / reuse. If the sole purpose of government monopolies is to subsidize the poor, then you should calculate the amount of money that is wasted in the process - the poor would be many times better off getting a direct minimum income instead!
--libman
I live in the desert. 75% humidity is unheard of here. I like to think that people are thinking about making water bottles for thirsty people in the desert. Oh, well.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
In the desert?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Yes, as long as it's an area that gets the morning fog (see the 75% humidity in the subject).
I need a humidifier for my basement, which presently costs me $1 a day in electricity and is run with freon 12.
A big one of these hydrophilic gadgets to get the humidity below 70%, without (much) electricity. I'll throw out the water.