What are your thoughts about tech capable of extracting water from humidity?
What are your thoughts about tech capable of extracting water from humidity?
Is this type of tech a hoax or it is really thing that was not considered enough for the upcoming water crisis around the world?
2024
Capitalists still haven't found a way to provide water to all of the 8 billion inhabitants of Planet Earth.
If there are aliens watching, they are laughing.
Capitalists still haven’t found a way to provide water to all of the 8 billion inhabitants of Planet Earth.
your mistake here is thinking they want to. if they wanted to, they would.
I have often thought that earth is just a giant ant farm for aliens to both laugh at, but also as an art generator machine.
If anything, they're to blame for the deprivation, waste, and pollution of freshwater in many regions. Even just in the imperial core- the US- there are countless examples of this, not to mention the well-documented, inhumane artificial droughts and water monopolization imposed on northern Mexico by a series of American dams and canals.
I think it's all about energy efficiency. Places with no access to clean water often also have no access to reliable energy sources.
right but is this actually better than desalination plants and pipes to pump it further inland? my gut says no, this is just like several other previous machines promising to do the same thing with horrific efficiency compared to desalination plants that already struggle with efficiency. maybe 20, 30+ years in the future we will be able to use machines that directly suck water out of the air efficiently, but desalination still seems like your best bet, especially since desalination continues to improve.
Your gut is right. After a quick search, it seems that the power consumption of a seawater desalination process is less than three kilowatt hours per meter squared for a large-scale plant.
However, the downside of desalination plant will be the cost of the infrastructure and the time it might take to have it up and running. With the "water extraction from air" machine, the cost is lower(I assume) and the size is smaller(Height: 259 cm, Width: 610 cm and Length: 224 cm). Seems like it might be quick to have this MoP up and running faster than the desalination plant while costing a ton of energy in the long run.
After checking this dude's website, it needs 475 Kwh/m3 in a desert condition which is a lot of energy.
With this in mind, using the data within this website, to achieve a daily 100 kWh electricity output, the people interested in this device will require 50 to 52 solar panels, each rated at 400 Watts. Now, if we multiply this times 5, they might 250 solar panels to deliver that kind of power.
In a hypothetic scenario, what could be done to make this practical?
Unfortunately, nothing really. The thermodynamics are just severely unfavourable. Water is an amazing coolant, by far one of the best. It takes up an insane amount of energy to vapourise. That Unfortunately also means it takes up a lot of energy to turn it back.
It would make more sense to focus on developing conventional technologies and reforestation in the Sahara. That path is a lot more viable
to give you an idea of the level of efficiency we're aiming for desalination with the latest tech rn, this paper from 2020* is saying that these news techs are shooting for under 3 Kwh/m3 power usage. so we would need a bare minimum 158x reduction in power usage just to match the most experimental of desalination techs. Now, it doesnt need to get quite this low to match desalination because of the problem with dealing with all the waste products from desalinating waste water, but it still means we need to get pretty close to that. so, what could be done to make this practical? a leap in tech akin to the level of progress we've seen in semiconductors, which seems very unlikely to me at this point in time. so, we will needs at bare minimum, 2 or 3 decades, if not centuries (if it's possible at all) to match that.
*I admit this is just one paper I found in like 10 seconds of searching, but this matches with other stuff I've read about desalination vs de-humidification in the past. still, maybe we'll all be super surprised and there's some secret to easily drawing water out of the atmosphere that we're all missing and we'll discover and it will usher in a new age of easily accessible fresh water.
This tech is just a reskinned dehumidifier. The scientist Youtuber Thunderf00t has made a number of videos debunking these types of claims. Their issues can be summed up as the following:
- they extract very little water while using a shitton of energy. The amount of energy required to condense water from gas into liquid equals the amount of energy required to boil said water, which is a lot. This is dictated by the laws of physics.
- they work best in humid conditions. These conditions only exist in places where you would ALREADY be able to find water, or when it is right about to rain ( as the natural humidity condenses to form rain clouds), in which case you can just catch and drink that.
- the water they produce is not clean. Do you want to drink the moldy water out of your dehumidifier? Model and bacteria grow on the cold, wet metal fins where the water condenses.
Next, let me sum up how to pull off this scam. First, buy a couple of commercial dehumidifiers. Next, put the equipment inside them into new, cool-looking equipment boxes. Third, call news stations saying you've solved water forever.
Interesting and thanks for sharing this! I will check Thunderf00t's videos then.
The water crisis is a problem of export/import. Water does not disappear, it just goes somewhere else, the problem is that water abundant places have been relentlessly exporting water, in crops and other commodities, for decades and we are slowly starting to see the consequences.
Capturing water from air humidity does not solve this particular problem, what it could do is provide some househould sovereignty. Now maybe i am just plain wrong but i dont think this machine is more efficient than simply capturing and processing rain water, which is already abundant in high humidity places.
The upcoming water crisis has to be addressed through collective action and consciousness not individuals using energy-expensive tech.
I apologize if I accidentally implied that collective action and consciousness is not needed.
No need for apologies! I'm just trying to communicate that the situation in which this tech is helpful in one where we have basically given up. The alternatives before us are vastly more efficient, they just require us to have actual control over them. Protectig aquifers, not giving companies free water, not giving companies control over water, building water infrastructure (Jakarta would not be sinking if services and infrastructure had been centrally guaranteed), addressing climate change, not living in inhospitable places (when just), etc.
It's real. It's how dehumidifiers work. It's not energy efficient, and more suitable for short term emergencies where you can't set-up an RO to pull water from a local lake.
Passive systems like this fog collecting tower save on energy but are large for the amount of water they collect : https://youtu.be/THJVuinPbc0?si=EHnQ_XQvQFvca3VG
Those towers use plastic mesh to collect the fog.
Researchers are working on new materials to collect more water : https://youtu.be/UlTbZ658eWM?si=6Ld8xemTOnAN7L43
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
cool tech, but I''m sure it's not anywhere near as effective/efficient as desalination plants and pipes to pump them further inland
I was reading a scientific article a few days ago about mealworms (of course), and the process by which they extract water from the air. Turns out it more than doubles their metabolic rate just to do that.
So even the biomimetics isn't going to get us very far on this one.
The kind of solution you're looking for involves moist soils with high levels of organic matter. That, and using less water for economic activity.
like an AC? unless this is some radically new things, we already have these machines
A/C's already do this but that is not the intended effect. This guy optimized it to not just cool air but optimise it to catch as much water as possible.
Exactly this! Also, according to this dude, it can work in places with low levels of humidity like the Sahel in Africa.
i think AC tech was originally invented to dehumidfy warehouses or something.
so this still sounds like the same tech, but tuned towards dehumidifying instead of cooling
More like a dehumidifier with power capable of extracting 5k liters aprox of water per day and that is safe to drink.
It is dumb.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It's not a hoax.
The cost is the energy you need to cool down the air so its humidity starts to condense.
You can see this principle work in any A/C unit, where they need to have a drainage for the condensed humidity.