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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to Kamen's "Slingshot" water purifier? [1] It was a little vapor compression distillation unit powered by a Stirling cycle engine. There was a tabletop-sized model, and a shipping-container sized model. There were announcements of field tests. Heavy PR around 2012, then silence.

There were a few demo installations, but it never appeared as a volume product. There's a similar technology from Simon Frasier University.[2] They're looking for someone to commercialize it.

A YC startup might start by deploying that technology in East Porterville, CA, where the wells have gone dry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_(water_vapor_distill... [2] https://www.biv.com/article/2016/5/water-machines-creator-th...

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Kamen ultimately learned that distribution of water purification machines was the most difficult problem.

Are you referring to the distance between the water that is being purified and the people who waht to use it?

AFAIK the system is installed near a water source (wells, rivers).

The distance refers to the supply chain and logistics involved shipping Slingshot to the villages, installing, and maintaining.

Based on the documentary[1] about it from 2015, he has partnered with Coke to build and distribute it.

Well worth a watch of you're unfamiliar with the project.

[1]: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3242934/

*Simon Fraser University

Edit: I am also very curious about what happened to that bad-ass machine from Kamen.

No special info but the machine looked awful expensive for the amount of water it would make.

The Israeli desalination plant "Sorek can produce a thousand liters (264 gal) of drinking water for 58 cents." And it can produce 624Km3/day or 150M m3 of water a year. That's 20% of Israeli domestic consumption.

That's $0.002 per gallon, about what CA water costs. All fresh from the sea.

75X cheaper than the 0.15 cents per gallon @mojomark estimates in the thread below that it would cost in fuel costs alone for a tanker to ship water from alaska.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

I can't tell exactly, but the $0.58/1000 liters seems to be amortizing the $400M investment cost, because it's on a 25 year Build - Operate - Transfer contract.

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