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XPrize's New Challenge: Turn Air Into Water, Make More Than a Million Dollars (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: If you can turn thin air into water, there may be more than $1 million in it for you. XPrize, which creates challenges that pit the brightest minds against one another, is hoping to set off a wave of new innovations in clean water -- and women's safety too. The company announced its Water Abundance XPrize and the Anu & Naveen Jain Women's Safety XPrize on Monday in New Delhi. The first competition will award $1.75 million to any team that can create a device able to produce at least 2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere, using completely renewable energy, for at most 2 cents a liter. Teams have up to two years to complete the challenge. India is at the center of the world's water crisis, with access to groundwater depleted in some northern and eastern parts of the country. Water has become so scarce in India that natural arsenic has infiltrated the soil and water in certain regions. While there are systems that can currently extract water from the atmosphere, many of them aren't energy-efficient, or generating enough water. "We know that overuse of groundwater resources are causing the water crisis and it's only getting worse," said Zenia Tata, XPrize's executive director of Global Expansion. The $1 million Women's Safety XPrize calls for an emergency alert system that women can use, even if they don't have access to their phones. The alert would have to be sent automatically and inconspicuously to emergency responders, within 90 seconds, at a cost of $40 or less a year. The device would have to work even in cases where there's no cellphone signal or internet access.
Dehumidifier.
Where do I claim my prize?
It would be nice if that safety device was not for a specific gender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)
What they should do is find a way to pump water into the central Asian basins.
All that wasted height of the Himalayas would be countered.
I guess we'll also need a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Better solution: Have fewer babies.
PM me for an address to which to send that $1M.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
my how times have changed?,, cease fire stand down.. truth+mercy=justice,, in the moms spirit of creation & compassion we trust.. no bomb us more mom us.... hugs not thugs,, hand in hand we stand,, its in all the manuals..
The next X-Prize will be "Turn water into wine".
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki...
It's a little over 83 liter of water per hour, presuming this is meant to be running 24 hours a day. So I'm going to guess this is meant to generate enough water for more than a single family. Maybe a good portion of a village. The details are light in the linked article. What's the target area's relative & absolute humidity and the season? Is it even possible for certain areas of the world to do that?
I'm I missing something or this have already been done? There's even a Billboard that filter the humidity in air to make drinkable water : http://bigthink.com/design-for...
Elok
I'll let you know where to send the check.
Getting water out of the air is easy.
The hard part is dealing with Sandpeople. They will steal your car, your droids... hell, even your wife.
The hardest part of this XPrize will be finding an interpreter who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
As with most of XPrize's "challenges", for any winners, the prize is chump change compared with simply taking the invention or accomplishment public. XPrize is just a PR firm with itself as its only client.
rain gutter. please send via PayPal
Depleting atmospheric water on any significant scale just makes things that much worse. Since now you are also dealing with artificial rainshadow.
If I could do this, I'd want a hell of a lot more than $2 million.
The $1 million Women's Safety XPrize calls for an emergency alert system that women can use, even if they don't have access to their phones. The alert would have to be sent automatically and inconspicuously to emergency responders, within 90 seconds, at a cost of $40 or less a year. The device would have to work even in cases where there's no cellphone signal or internet access."
Women hell, I'll take one if you can meet THOSE requirements! I am guessing the magic needed for no cel and no Wi-Fi access won't come in under $40 a year since the cel ones cost more than that already.
My device already does that. It is located right next to or in Niagara Falls and can produce 2KL an hour!
Very similar to vapirators in most respects.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Maybe I'm not thinking this thing through, but do we really have so much extra air that we can start willy-nilly turning it into water?
And wouldn't a better solution be to just start turning people into Soylent Green?
You are welcome on my lawn.
This has already kinda been done using the hydrogen internal combusion engine. Not only will it create water from hydrogen and oxygen, it'll do work at the same time. The problem here is that the hydrogen can't just be plucked out of the atmosphere because it's so light it escapes, so you have to figure out where that's going to come from. You could buy it, but then you're not getting it from air.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The device would have to work even in cases where there's no cellphone signal or internet access.
I have heard rumours of an ancient but powerful magical spell that can call upon the emergency services. Or summon giant eagles. I think it works on whichever of the two is closest.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki...
Does Frank Herbert have a patent on this idea?
With global temperatures rising, is pulling large amounts of water from the air a good idea? I have no idea and am asking because this was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this. Seems like it might not be, but I have no idea.
Am I the only one who thinks that anyone who can make a device that pulls "2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere, using completely renewable energy, for at most 2 cents a liter" would be far, far better to patent the machine and then sell it themselves? The device they are describing would be so miraculous - not to mention useful - that the $2 million prize would be small change to what the inventors would get if they commercialized it.
I mean, I'm all for encouraging scientists and don't think that science should only be about making money, but for what they are describing, they really ought to be offering a /real/ prize rather than what would be comparative pocket-change to the device's actual value.
I mean, I read that the cost of desalinization in California costs ~$10,000 per person (and that's just for the cost of the building plant, not the power or the distribution); to desalinate enough water for the whole state would cost close to $400 billion dollars. A machine that could create water for 5 people (2000 liters is a little more than 500 gallons; Americans use about 100 gallons of water a day) for $40 a day would have municipalities breaking down the inventor's door. XPrize really should offer remuneration that reflects the importance and value of the invention.
Clearly written by a man who only thinks with his little head.
The exponential Birth rate in India will cancel out any gains.
It has to be able to send an alert to responders within 90 seconds, discreetly, and work in areas with no cellular service or internet access.
Welp, that's a million dollars that'll never be awarded.
Umm, might want to look at what the women want. I guess it takes a man to say: get a dog.
But hey. If a woman can't keep a man, then there's no betting that she'll be able to keep a dog either.
Oh yeah, how could I forget: also she has 90 seconds. How silly of me. Even with 90 seconds, she needs help. I can't think of a place in my life where 90 seconds wouldn't already be enough for me to get away. But I've got 90 seconds, a dog, friends, a community, a cell phone, money, and a strong woman by my side.
So now we're talking about women without any ability to keep money, nor to keep a man, nor to keep a dog. And they want it to be inconspicuous because they also don't want strangers to save them. So, no money, no man, no dog, no friends, and no community, and no phone.
Yeah. Now that's a woman worth saving.
Make the prize two million. You've got nothing to lose. You've already eliminated every solution that's worked for men for thousands of years. They're called friends. Strangers turned into friends, friends you brought with you, canine friends. Every one of them is totally and completely free-as-in-beer, or shall we say free-as-in-friends.
Takes a women to want to buy a friend, I guess. A $40 friend.
It must have been really painful forcing that red pill into your dickhole.
Reading just the Slash Dot part (not the original article), it seems that India has a shortage of water so now they want to take it from the air. Well... fine. But that will dry out the air and if done to excess, will change the weather and ultimately, less rain fall will come down in other areas (or perhaps even the same area) of the water extraction plants. It just seems like a classic robbing Peter to pay Paul scenario.
how cool is this
http://waterseer.org/
Go well
Extra points if you can do it... in the cloud.
Over a few decades... sure.
The "inconspicuousness requirement" might make that more like three or four decades.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Step 1 go up to Home Depot.
) Step 2 buy a length of hose for $10
Step 3 connect one to each of the hundreds of millions of air conditions that dot the planets.
Step 4 collect the condensation instead of letting it run down the drain.
Use said water for toilet flushing, growing crops etc.
I get 5-10 gallons a day off my AC during the summer. It probably averages out to 2 gallons a day for the whole year.
That would be 200 million gallons of water per day or 73 Billion gallons per year assuming my 2 gallons a day as the average multiplied by 100,000,000 homes. sized air conditioners globally. 1 Billion dollars to retrofit 100million air conditioners. The hoses would last 10 years.
Price per gallon. 1.4 cents per gallon
Oh wait they wanted in Liters. ok. That would be 0.36 cents per Liter. 5.5 time under what they wanted.
Pay up bitches.
In fact, it's closer to heating than cooling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
How much is common sense. Don't go down the dark alley drunk whore. Don't go jogging in secluded areas at nighttime dressed like a hooker, slut. Lol. But really, common sense seems to be a bit scarce.
Israel has been doing an excellent job of it. And India has more landmass directly adjacent to the ocean.
https://www.scientificamerican...
Not at 0% humidity of course, that's just a silly idea even if you can find a few H atoms. IIRC there was a company that used a hygroscopic substance to absorb moisture from the air at very low relative humidity, then extact it. There were supposedly some deployments at military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan a few years ago, and that's the last I heard of it. Of course there were patents, but the idea is pretty simple:
1. Get hygroscopic substance such as calcium chloride (I don't know what the company used, that might have been their secret sauce), and expose it to air for a while.
2. Close the door on the batch and then expose it to heat, low pressure, or some other process that causes the H2O to come out so you can distill it.
3. Open the door and repeat.
If the X-Prize folk searched "atmospheric water generator", they would find multiple commercial products that run on electricity. Then, they would simply need to set up a solar panel system, and they'd be done.
I live in a desert, and have looked into getting one of these systems. The (commercial) system I'm looking at has a cost that would meet their guidelines for production and cost, provided a working life of about 20 years. That's... not unreasonable.
Why don't we all use this technology? Because I'm billed for water (in the desert, in a drought) at $0.0015 per liter. If I'm really wasting water, and I get a fine for over-use, then I'm punished with a rate of $0.0036 per liter. If the cost for atmospheric water condensing was $0.02 (the X-Prize target), it still wouldn't be cheaper than aqueducts hundreds of miles long or ocean desalination (the two sources of my water). If they're going to have a cost target, it should be a lot lower. Really, they should be looking for creative ways to scale and capitalize the existing systems. We don't need more technology here, just different financing models.
make the phone go into wifi hotspot mode where the ssid is an asymmetrically encrypted string that is recognized only by phones nearby running the same App, which try to connect to the internet themselves, or do the same thing ..
Or an emergency wifi network maybe ?
The atmosphere isn't everywhere the same. Probably where they want the water isn't a place where looking for it in the atmosphere is going to help.
Turning humidity into drinking Water at suitable rate/quantity is a) completely impractical, and b) ignores the real issue of water treatment.
Here is a case in point
The more you watch that video, the more you'll realise how unrealistic it is to turn humidity into water. The video covers a specific case, but the generalities are true enough for any approach (e.g. conservation of energy)
Also, as pointed out in the video, most people (and animals) gravitate to and settle near a supply of water (even in arid climates), the problem is however: making/keeping that water clean, safe and drinkable. Please solve that!
Why waste time turning air into water when we already have the holy grail of turning air into alcohol?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Commodites 101: The commodity (water in this case) must be delivered at the [single] point specified (which is not in the US / EU / AUS (/ UK) / ENE Asia). Get your "costs" to include transport and recalculate. Remember, it must be potable at the point of delivery (not the point of production)!
I heard stillsuits are efficient enough to allow someone to survive in a desert.
According to the MSM India is rape central but still, shouldn't we be concerned about everyone's safety? Sounds sexist to me.
Go to a lake, toss some water in the air, catch water as it falls out of the thin air.
I'll take a cashiers check please.
No matter what, you are still stuck with energy it takes to condense water vapor into water ( the latent heat) and that is 2264.76kJ/kg. Next you have filtration cost so you had better have a big power plant someplace close.
That is big news. Someone needs to tell the UN and all their little SJW, tree hugger buddies about it.
You know though an extra 73 Billion gallons per year in the first world will have an impact on the 3rd. The tech for water capture will be made cheaper and make it's way into the 3rd. The extra food and manufacturing that will come with a drop in the price of water will result in more goods and services which too will find its way into the 3rd.
You don't make people's lives better by showing up with a tanker truck full of water. You make it easier for them to get water on their own and they will.
They will cancel the prize once you've won, they did it for the genetics big data prize...