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Swedish Machine Turns Sweat Into Drinking Water
New submitter Taffykay writes "Swedish designers developed the Sweat Machine to drain perfectly good drinking water from sweaty clothes! PR Agency Deportivo has teamed up with UNICEF to show off the machine at the Gotha Cup youth soccer tournament in order to highlight how many people around the world lack access to basic drinking water."
..Already beat them to it with their sugared urine.
Stillsuite?
So now we can actually make Red Bull drinkable ? Sounds like progress....
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
So how long before I can haz sillsuit?
Seriously, that is what everyone else is thinking right? I fully expect in the time I typed this that this story has gone from 0 comments to about 4 people beating me to mentioning stillsuits.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Sorry guys, but NASA has been doing this since the Apollo missions.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
That was urine in Waterworld. Sweat recycling is in Dune.
The Swedish sweat their sweaters sweetly.
Turning sweat into drinking water is lame. I drink straight from the source! - Edward “Bear” Grylls
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Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
Where are my mod points when I need them?
I wonder if you could do anything interesting with it using fermented corn mash
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Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
These days, Slashdot is a roll of the DICE.
Dune Stillsuits reclaimed all water that was excreted by the body. From sweat to waste products, and even including the moisture from breath. That's why they had the nose plugs.
sudo make me a sandwich
...so I guess this make sense!
Ezekiel 23:20
Sweat is processed in pockets here and here, urine and excreta on the thighpads here. With a properly maintained stillsuit you may survive for weeks, even in the deep desert.
Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
Are you sure about that? Waterworld was a saltwater world, as in: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. People have died of thirst in the middle of a the earth's oceans for lack of energy efficient water purification equipment so effectively you would have a pretty good use case for a stillsuit in Waterworld. Perhaps not quite as much as you would have on Arrakis but a stillsuit could nevertheless come in handy as emergency equipment since sweat is easier to recycle than seawater due to it being less saline (9PPT vs 35PPT) meaning that filters would probably last longer. A stillsuit would be even more useful if the material the stillsuit was made of also functioned as a big wearable solar cell to power the purifier since, according to several survival gurus on the various science channels, hand powered water purifiers actually cause you to lose more water than you gain by using such a device. Wearing the purifier and getting free energy by wearing it would be pretty neat.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
McDonald's already does that.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
This site isn't what it used to be.
It never was.
Let's thank Nestle for that as they drain our rivers and aquifers dry while the rest of us are being rationed.
There's plenty of water. It is the corrupt business of distribution that is causing any shortages. Same goes for food and energy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Better yet, we need the water extractor from Tank Girl that reclaims ALL the water in someone's body. Then use it on you for bringing up Waterworld.
Also ripped off from Dune.
That's Gothia Cup, not Gotha Cup. TFA has it wrong as well.
Horrible event, btw. The city is filled with thousands of smelly little football playing brats, making transportation all but impossible.
May we live long and die out
If its the model in TFA photo, no processing is necessary. I'll drink it as is.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's reported one of the betaq testers said, when asked how well it worked: "hey, no sweat!"
I was always bothered by the thermodynamics of Stillsuits. Sweat evaporation is the body's cooling system. So if you're wearing a suit that then recondenses that water then you're gonna cook.
Superhuman psychics, and men capable of folding space time I was ok with.
When I think urine recyc. I think Red Dwarf. Another second place for WW.
In Dune they waited until the guy was dead. Also wasn't there a similar thing in Stranger in a Strange Land? That one came out four years before Dune.
A stillsuit in the middle of the ocean would be idiotic. Why capture a thimbleful of salty, oily sweat when there is an unlimited supply of seawater around you? Even if it is more saline, there's actually enough of it to be of use. Aside from hand cranked purifiers, there are solar powered, and gravity powered units. There are probably even wind and wave powered. I saw a unit on a science show back in the 1970s that looked like an inner tube with a clear plastic cone attached to it. You inflated it, set it afloat, and the sun did all the work. Heck, a properly designed life raft can be its own desalinator.
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Who can turn away the Angel of Death? What Shai-hulud has decreed must be.
The cooling effect of sweat is the result of the evaporation of water on the skin, which uses thermal energy. The resultant loss of energy lowers the temperature of the skin, and a continuous flow of blood to and from the cooled area lowers the core temperature. So long as it allows the actual evaporation to occur, there's no reason it wouldn't work to condense it again. No broiler effect would occur.
You've only got half the thermodynamics equation there. If evaporation consumes heat energy, condensation releases it. So when the stillsuit recondenses the evaporated water into liquid water, it will create a nice toasty suit offsetting the cooling effect of the sweat.
look man if you can turn sweat and urine into drinking water.. why not saltwater?
waterworld was 100% sunny all the time.. evaporating would have been easy enough. if you got the parts for a stillsuit.. surely you should be thinking about dune. but then again, where were the stillsuits in dune dumping all the heat? serious question. if you don't use the evaporating for cooling you're pretty much fucked in a gimp suit standing in the desert.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ever notice that humidity makes a hot day feel even hotter? The more humid the atmosphere, the less heat your body can dissipate via sweating. In a closed stillsuit that traps all water, relative humidity will rapidly max out and evaporation will halt altogether. Your body will still sweat, but it will not evaporate. All the stillsuit does is collect this water so you don't lose it. It is a tradeoff of sacrificing cooling for retaining water.
Now, perhaps if the suit had some type of heat-pump system it could remove enough heat to condense water vapor, however if it could do this it would be more effective to use this heat pump to transfer the heat from direct contact with your skin rather than attempting to conduct the heat through an insulating layer of humid air. That said, another principle of the Dune stillsuit is that it is powered by the wearers body motion. Physical activity burns calories which generates yet more heat that such a heat-pump system would also have to remove.
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You wear this Sweat Machine in desert fashion. Who taught you to do that ?
You ain't got a thing, if you ain't got that ping.
is if they can turn Coors Light into something fit to drink. :P
The cooling effect of sweat is the result of the evaporation of water on the skin, which uses thermal energy. The resultant loss of energy lowers the temperature of the skin, and a continuous flow of blood to and from the cooled area lowers the core temperature. So long as it allows the actual evaporation to occur, there's no reason it wouldn't work to condense it again. No broiler effect would occur.
You've only got half the thermodynamics equation there. If evaporation consumes heat energy, condensation releases it. So when the stillsuit recondenses the evaporated water into liquid water, it will create a nice toasty suit offsetting the cooling effect of the sweat.
Yes, but the suit can be nice and toasty on the outside, and remain comfortable to the occupant. Phase change salts, peltier/seebeck devices; there's plenty of ways of sinking the heat somewhere.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
> (b) you can only build up so much heat before convection keeps the temperature stable (not sure if
> that's enough to survive though).
Ever seen a dog pant in the heat? They do that because they don't sweat. The bigger the animal, the more of a problem that is (less surface area per unit volume). A small human is about the size of a mid sized dog.
Wearing a suit like this, you effectively wont have sweat glands either....except.... Dune claims it still works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_of_the_Dune_universe claims Leto the first had this to say:
so at least it mentions heat exchangers and other sources of water loss. I still smell BS on the idea that this can all be accomplished with pumps that actuate from walking, but more so that "near normal evaporation" and "heat exchangers" can work this way, unless the entire outer layer is a huge metalic heat sink...with fins? Maybe some sort of nano-material with a huge surface area? Seems like a major problem.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
See the section on Chemical synthesis and commercial production.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Not always. In Dune Messiah, Korba was sentenced to the Death Stills for plotting with rebels to assassinate Muad'Dib.
sudo make me a sandwich
What I'm saying is that as soon as you envelope the wearer with a water-tight suit the sweating has no net cooling effect. Sweating works because you shed the excess heat in the moisture leaving your body. If you try to keep the water you have to find another way to cool it. You could use a different process to cool the lining of the suit enough to cause water to condense on it but if you could do that it would be more efficient to directly press the cool suit against the wearers skin.
With an external power source, sure you could be as cool as you like. You'd want to carry the solar panels like an umbrella though rather than wear them on the surface of the suit. A 20% efficient solar panel would convert 20% of the Sun's energy to usable electricity while the other 80% would just be heating you up. Carrying the solar panels will also require more physical exertion which generates heat.
This topic has been analyzed by others as well http://web.archive.org/web/20080319013644/http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/mar/14/exploring-duniverse-of-frank-herbert/. Basically, a stillsuit as described in Dune won't work, and sure you could engineer something that would be more practical.
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what a feat ... not
How does the machine work? Another lacking summary delivered to you by Slashdot.
"A pile of sweaty clothes goes into the dryer in order to spin out the water. This is then exposed to UV light before it passes through the high-tech filter to remove salt and bacteria. And lastly, the water is funneled through a coffee filter to remove clothing fibers." ... and lastly, the water is funneled through a coffee filter to remove clothing fibres??!?
Something tells me that the machine works as well as all those free energy machines and magnetic gasoline enhancers that you read about.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A stillsuit in the middle of the ocean would be idiotic. Why capture a thimbleful of salty, oily sweat when there is an unlimited supply of seawater around you? Even if it is more saline, there's actually enough of it to be of use. Aside from hand cranked purifiers, there are solar powered, and gravity powered units. There are probably even wind and wave powered. I saw a unit on a science show back in the 1970s that looked like an inner tube with a clear plastic cone attached to it. You inflated it, set it afloat, and the sun did all the work. Heck, a properly designed life raft can be its own desalinator.
Firstly who says you can't purify seawater with a still suit? You could engineer it to absorb water through the outer surface which is what fish do although that would make it more of a 'fish-suit'. Secondly a still-suit/fish-suit would have a whole lot more surface area from which to generate energy than a solar panel suspended on the outside of your boat which is easily damaged or lost, you take a still-suit/fish-suit with you wherever you go and you could use excess energy to power other stuff such as a built in emergency beacon. As for inflatable solar stills, I have talked to people who actually tried to use them and the general consensus was that when they work you get briny water and not a lot of it either. Plus the moment your boat starts to rock or the waves get too big you are shit out of luck. I'm not saying regular purifiers don't work (some of the powered ones probably do work acceptably well) but a wearable water purifier would be pretty convenient especially if you your ship sinks and you don't make it to the lifeboat. Keep in mind that sailors in the North Atlantic have been issued with survival suits for years now that prolong your life expectancy in freezing arctic water from minutes to hours or even days and fitting them with a built in purifier is a pretty natural upgrade. Thirdly we are talking about semi science fiction tech here, not religion. Don't take this too seriously
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
You're talking about a world where prescience is real and mutated humans teleport ships around with their brains because of a magic "spice" made of dead giant sandworms, which one of the main characters eventually *becomes* over thousands of years, and that's your nitpick?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Actually melange was produced by the living sandworms, the water of life was the result of killing them with water, which was given to the reverand mother whose body changed it from a poison to a potent orgy inducing hallucinogen.
Anyway, point taken but, we were specifically talking about the stillsuits and feasibility of them as described.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nanotech heatsink with fractal surface area.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."