Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
github.com
github.com
[1] - https://x.company/blog/posts/sharing-project-amber-with-the-...
[2] - https://x.company/blog/posts/sharing-makani-with-the-world-t...
The unspoken part of that is that the changes in question should be profitable for Alphabet. Anything else is just PR for recruiting and marketing.
> "Is it a research center? An incubator? A non-profit? No, it’s a moonshot factory"
X spends huge sums of money but never takes this approach of intentionally open sourcing a project during continued development in order to tap in to eager innovators all over the world who could contribute. And I think that is unfortunate because that approach can be extremely effective for lowering the cost of things and making them accessible to people all over the world. Personally I feel like they could do this with a few small projects as it is a very cheap development methodology. It would cost them basically nothing compared to their other projects. But then you can't profit from it (as much), so it doesn't fit in to what X is doing.
Which is weird, because X is a powerful development house. They could score a lot of goodwill if they did this on a few of the right projects. And it would have kept me there. But I couldn't find anything like that.
I feel the same disappointment as you. As a child I envisioned a world where I could go work at somewhere like Google and truly use their resources to give back but every project seems in some way tainted by the underlying drive to make everything profitable for the company funding it.
Here are some flight logs they released: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/bigquer...
They also released reports that describe their findings; it's quite detailed (here's part 1 of 3): https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Maka...
I don't know what standard we're holding companies to for projects they're shutting down. From my experience, projects that are closing down don't get as much support prioritization, especially when they're deemed unsuccessful.
I share your sentiment that we could get even more; it sounds like you're seeing even more interesting things the public is not. I am grateful for what they have provided so far.
But Makani is one project, and again my only push back is whether they have been "really good" about releasing projects or whether there have been a relatively small number of notable releases.
My general feeling was that they are really almost 100% focused on profit and for the managers I met, I did not feel like they even understood the world-changing potential of open source. If your primary interest is in changing the world, you can get a LOT done with open source. Especially with the money they have. A relatively small project that releases a quality design and then continues to develop it while other people clone it in my mind has the best chance of gaining traction.
But that requires letting go of control. And I did not get the sense they were interested in that kind of thing. So I left and started my own open source project to explore this theory. In three years we have spent as much money as they would spend on a single mistake. I really wish they were more open to this kind of development, but I don't think they are really set up for it.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
So then I left and started an open source farming robot project I am really proud of:
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
[1] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ca6c332f-2cc5...
Let's say that I'm not an engineer or a researcher or a coder, but would like to set some of these units up to collect water. How do I do so? Do I approach someone to build this for me (who?)? How much can I expect it to cost?
In other words, how can I actualize this vision:
> So the H2E team asked: “What if you could put the power to generate daily drinking water into the hands of individuals, no matter where they live, by creating an affordable, easy to use device that harvests water from the air and is powered by the sun?"
What exactly is a data center by your definition? What individuals (that are entirely disconnected from corporations) need them? How many individuals have personal data centers of such a scale that they would need to produce liquid water on-site for their computing needs?
I genuinely believe you’ve described an entirely theoretical person that doesn’t reside in this universe.
Most modern buildings have at least few racks of compute/storage for services like TV/phone/internet, camera recordings, etc. Even family houses have small racks nowadays.
Ignoring this specific example, a majority of the population uses social media for leisure and online tools for work (email, banking, etc.).
A majority of interconnects between ISPs and networks are hosted in data centres too... so there wouldn't be much of an internet without them.
If you closed all data centres over night, the majority of the above would disappear and certainly would not be able to scale as large as it had without data centres... hence, a majority of people need data centres to maintain their current standard of living.
And considering how highly technical something like a modern water treatment plant can be, data centers are already a major force behind some of our potable water.
If the principle of it is sound, which I cannot verify, then by a manufacturer picking up the idea. Developing it into a product and selling it to individuals.
They are basically saying (paraphrasing) "Hey we suck at manufacturing things at scale, so we won't continue with this idea. But we don't want to let our learnings go to waste. Go ahead and learn from our experiments and mistakes. Maybe one of you out there can make it work as a product."
>The team aimed to build a highly lightweight, portable, cheap (<5% of user’s income) device that an individual could use to produce 5L of drinking water per day.
Why is it "dystopian" and "co-opting" if a company uses a technology like this to operate in a more environmentally friendly way?
People love to shit on companies (not specific ones, just "big companies" as a concept in general), completely ignoring where our standard of living comes from.
But also because this is a prototype, and they wanted to be able to tinker and measure, there's lots of design features and parts that are quite expensive and not really needed. Assembly also appears to be tricky and time consuming with non-trivial risk of damaging parts that then need to be repaired.
So ultimately you have a design and plan that's neither directly suitable for mass-production or low volume production (which is fine! it's a prototype! it's super not done). The prototype as described would likely form an acceptable basis for further revision.
You could probably go to a mechanical engineering design/consulting/prototyping firm with this and ask them to make it real with minimal changes (removing extraneous measurement devices, maybe swap out some of the grommets). It'd probably cost you like 50k at least to get your first one. Second one probably will cost like 100 bucks range.
... a more business-focused GitHub.
... an OpenSea for inventors.
Imagine if money spent on NFTs would go to cool projects instead of avatars!
Let the investors allocate their money efficiently, rather than buying a gold mine as a movie theatre company (as an example).
That's a pretty random example. Crypto? Maybe. But it's not like AMC is going to randomly get into the actual physical mining busin-- (hold on, it's 2022, lmgt just in case)
Yes, a perfectly good example.
Open Collective is designed to do exactly that:
Or if none of that happens, at the very least it serves as a free bit of knowledge telling others going down this path "it didn't work"
For example, while I have some viability questions the company Terraformation has been trial'ing photovoltaic solar powered water desalinization (using brackish wells as a source) in deforested areas for water - https://www.terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalinati...
If I understand correctly (still learning and might be wrong), another way to frame this is in perceiving water vapor itself - you can be in desertifying areas and yet supposedly have plenty of water vapor to a lack of evapotranspiration. This is what some have framed 'the second leg of anthropogenic climate change' - ( https://museecology.com/2020/10/30/15-professor-millan-the-s... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf4jwkhCk_A - "Desert or rainforest" , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcsQw3ma_Y - "Restoring the Water Cycle 1" )
Thunderf00t has made a ton of videos about devices like this, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns
The TLDW version is these devices are fancy dehumidifiers. They need a ton of power, and lots of air humidity to be practical, which are exactly not the conditions these devices are advertised to operate in.
And even then, the water they produce is dirty, so it needs to be purified and treated to be actually drinkable.
Even if we solve all these challenges, it turns out that doing something dumb and low tech, like transporting drinking water on trucks is actually a lot more efficient.
This is another one in the long list of devices designed to help those hypothetical poor people, like OLPC and the Gravity Light.
It turns out these people have already solved these issues, and much better, usually with off-the-shelf alternatives and a bit of ingenuity.
Haven’t there been umpteen attempts at this? I thought there’s not that much water in the air. The volume of air to move must be crazy.
Maybe I should read TFA
https://hvacguides101.com/is-dehumidifier-water-safe-to-drin...
The upper bound is nice, the lower bound kinda hurts. I can't tell if they are tracking the night cycle and harvesting when the dewpoint drops. Is this all calculation or is there a blueprint I am missing.
> The prototype described here is a purely experimental device. While substitutions and modifications are reasonably straightforward, water harvested with this experimental device is not intended to be ingested. Among other design choices, adhesives were selected for experimental performance and would need to be substitued with ones meeting food grade standards.
What would you prefer, them never releasing it, so interested people have nothing to start from? I’m not a Google fan, but I see this as a positive.
Israel has made a massive desalination plant, to turn salt water into potable water and it's no easy task. If they could have taken water from the atmosphere I'm sure they would have tried.
It's a pipe dream so far.
They are not equivalent. Yes, it's disappointing; however, open sourcing it makes it easier for someone else to continue the relay race, rather than needlessly experience Groundhog Day.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/solar-extracts-drinkable-water-101...
There was a HN post 7 months ago, too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28265067
The commenters didn't seem to see much use in it ^^
I wonder if something like this (possibly with less focus on "clean" water - it's rural and breezy, so I don' think raw output would harm trees...) could be suitable for generating summer water for tree irrigation.
I wish the overview PDF had more labels...
Any water condensed from the air is going to be "pure" by most measures. It's essentially distilled water.
You can improve it easily by filtering. It's much easier than filtering the final water. But it's not necessarily pure.
The site is ~ 1/4 mile from the ocean, so I think the air won't be totally dry... but just won't get a lot of rainfall. Mostly wondering if there's a good way to 'moisture farm' to keep the soil around trees moist. Ideally with no more power than a small solar panel located right next to the device, so I don't have to run power there (there's well and power at the bottom of the hill... but moisture farming would be cooler than running irrigation :-P).
And you can freely give it for spherical cows to drink in vacuum.
Keeping any such device free from contamination is very difficult. Bacteria love the moist environments. Leave it unattended and you have moist dust. Lovely.
Quite a lot of energy, but at least you can market it as double-distilled, like a fancy spirit.
I'm hoping heavy woodchip mulching can get me enough water retention to keep trees happy (we certainly get plenty of water the other ~9 months of the year!), but some supplemental water during the hot dry summer would probably significantly expand species and variety options.
Have a small well that should be able to help some... but looking at permaculture techniques (hugelkulture, swales etc) and possibly moisture farming as a potential way to improve moisture conditions in a 'greener' way then energy intensive pumping. Might try to build a pond high up on the hill to filter down over the dry season.
Kind of a paradoxical region, because plants want lots of water when there's lots of sun, and here we generally get one or the other :-/
This, or tanks (to cut down on evaporation).
Pretty common here on the BC coast for people to plumb the gutters of their house and outbuildings to tanks and then use that stored water in the summer for the garden or topping off wells.
If you have 9 months of rain/live in a temperate rainforest it's not likely conjuring water out of the air is worth the effort :)
Requires an electric motor to circulate air.
What is the intersection of people who a) can afford an expenditure of $150, b) have reliable access to electricity and can pay for it, and c) can't get their hands on five liters of clean water a day?
Those people probably cannot afford $150, but the goal of the project wasn't $150, it was lower.
The unit is supposed to be solar powered, so access to electricity isn't strictly necessary, in the sense of being able to connect to the grid. They just need sunlight.
There is a sweet spot of cost, where those who need it can't afford it, but nonprofits, billionaire philanthropists, and local governments can afford to purchase and distribute such devices where necessary. In cases where the need for clean water greatly outweighs the supply, such entities see a good return on investment, simply by improving the health of those people there.
Furthermore, X is a moonshot program at Google. They attempt solutions for big problems with high likeihood of failure. Are you suggesting they shouldn't do this with their money printing ad machine? It seems like any good that comes out of that company should be celebrated, and in this case they are sharing a bunch of work on solving what will be an increasing large problem for the entire world.
It also clearly shows an electric circulating fan in the diagrams.
Again from the readme.
You're correct that the slide deck mentions a $150 price point. The readme mentions cheap as less than 5% of total income. If we assume the poorest people in the world, who walk miles each day to access water, then we are talking about income levels of ~$365-$730 a year. 5% of that is less than $150.
All of my points still stand. Project X at Google set out to solve one of the very hard problems in the world, and made their findings and work available to the public for free. It's clearly not supposed to be something going to market, so asking who will buy it that needs fresh water is obtuse, IMO.
Second, the claim that the water isn't clean enough for drinking should be qualified. You can drink it and survive, hopefully. But bacteria exist in these water sources that give people dysentery or other illnesses from which they die. In underdeveloped parts of the world there are poor mortality rates. Humanitarian goals seek to improve those mortality rates, and providing clean(er) water is one way to do that.
Don't take my word for it though. Factfulness is a great book by Hans Rosling that discusses how the poorest people in the world live and some efforts to improve those lives, even if that's not the main focus of the book (it was the main focus of Rosling's career, iirc).
There is some pretty good data to peruse (particularly the aggregates at the bottom of the page) here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?most_recent...
I've read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because population growth is bad, the world has too many people, it's already at or exceeding its carrying capacity, there's no way the whole world can live at Western levels, people in the West are super greedy and borderline evil for living like kings while everybody else starves. You and I need to get a lot poorer to free up resources for Asians and Africans to get out of extreme poverty, and if we object to becoming a whole lot poorer for the benefit of strangers halfway around the world, we're terrible evil racists.
I've also read a lot of stuff that says we should panic because populations are shrinking and aging. Economic growth is fueled by population growth, Social Security in the US and really the whole world's economic system is a Ponzi scheme based on an exponentially increasing population, we're headed for a ton of turmoil and collapse. If America wants to avoid a complete economic collapse, or having to replace its population with a super high immigration level that really ignites political tensions (think Trump presidency but 10 times worse), everyone needs to start having tons of babies like right now.
Is it really the case that positive growth and negative growth are both catastrophes? How does it even make logical sense that there are too many and too few people at the same time? Or is somebody lying? If so, who, and how can we tell?
PS. On top of that this country isn’t the unsafest drinking water place on the planet.
Edit: There's also this water bottle I remember seeing a while back on Kickstarter or Indigogo. It doesn't seem like they actually sell it on the website: https://fontus.at/
Regardless you need quite a bit of solar to get a decent amount of water.
At first pass, I would guess that something like this would primarily be useful in places with naturally high humidity, which aren't likely to have a shortage of water in the first place, no?
Maybe the argument is that the natural sources of water are dirty, and extracting from the air is automatically clean and safe to drink, but it still seems like it may be more resource efficient to invest in water treatment, not a fleet of dehumidifiers.
It isn't, though. Bacteria accumulate. Dehumidifiers are generally very nasty. Although bacteria can then be killed (not sure about their toxins), while other contaminants may not be very easy to get rid of.
Almost every place on Earth has humidity above 0%. Which makes it possible to extract water, even if it's very inefficient. People have condensed water successfully in deserts.
At least tell us why it’s a dead end.
That doesn't mean it's useless for everybody. So they publishing it may improve somebody's life.
https://x.company/blog/posts/sharing-project-h2e-with-the-wo...
Allow me to snip a few quotes: "After three years of work, the team felt confident they could build a device that would produce water for $.10 per liter; however, it would have taken significant development work and iteration to prove feasibility at $.01 per liter. Additionally, the next phase of work for the project looked to be heavily focused on hardware integration and mass production expertise — not X’s sweet spot."
And:
"Given these factors, it became clear that X wasn’t best suited to take the work forward, and one of the best ways X could have an impact now on the problem of access to safe drinking water was to share what we’ve learned."
I have no idea what the prior state of the art of modelling viable areas for harvesting was (I presume this is probably where X made the largest contribution). As the blogpost identifies... X is not really the best group to tinker with large scale, low cost manufacturing prototyping and scale up.
They won't sue you for using the findings or design, but they still have U.S. Patent on it and our pledging that Google will not sue those who use this intellectual property nor will anyone they transfer the patent to be able to sue.
What they call "infringement" just means that since they hold a patent others "copying" it would technically be infringing the patent - but they pledge not to sue.
What needs to be done is using some of the GIS tools they released to find good locations for air->water setups, is figure out what materials and manufacturing techniques are available in those locations. This way you are more likely to design something that makes a difference. Anything built with materials or techniques that are not local will break, and they will be unable to repair because they do not have access to either the materials or the tools needed to do repairs.
Almost every part looks to be made from scratch. The only thing off the shelf is the pink insulation foam. Can any of this be sourced in the target markets?
Pity that it couldn't move forward.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
Father: "Have patience my son, there's only 4 more ads until the next ounce will be generated, and we can usually skip one of them after a few seconds"
I know, it's a cheap shot since X could have just mothballed the research and wrapped it up in patents.
Without knowing that, I don't really want to touch it. If I spent a couple of years trying to take their prototype design and bring it to market, only to discover the fundamental flaw that also caused them to can the project, it would be massive waste of my time and resources.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN...
Hope it still works out, but I feel another sad Segway story coming up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_(water_vapor_distill...
Has Google Moonshot produced _anything_ that’s commercially a big success? Seems to me that giving Astro Teller and a bunch of smart people blank cheques helps them have tones of fun without the pressure of actually succeeding?
Only Americans buy into this kind shit and Elon Musks stupid ideas
It's a largely passive device and not really comparable to the solar electric designs.
I wish people would use their own brain instead of just parroting whatever thunderfoot says. Maybe the problem is that people aren't finding the actual overview PDF? https://github.com/google/h2e_technical_documentation/blob/m...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg - Zero Mass Water: BUSTED! "Honestly, it drives me crazy how many people have reinvented the dehumidifier, put a solar panel on it, and the media has danced around like theyve just saved the world!"
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvXnmBIO7o - Self-filling water bottle: BUSTED! "The fact that its thermodynamically impossible seem to stop 'science communicators' from promoting this. The fact that its a really dumb, and not particularly inventive idea didnt stop the 'science communicators' from promoting this. Kinda depressing really."
Problems include:
- it's much cheaper to bring in a tanker of water from somewhere else, than for the electricity to do this.
- It's a dehumidifier; in places where the air is wet, it rains, and you don't need it. In places where you need it, you need it because there's not much water, so it doesn't work well.
- It's going to be prone to growing bacteria; warm and moist.
- It needs a vast volume of air; when water becomes steam it expands 1000x. Which means to go the other way you need at least 1000 litres of steam dragged through for a litre of water. Air can be around 4% water says Britannica.com, so 20,000 litres of humid air for a litre of water if it's perfectly efficient. Thunderf00t's estimate is 50,000 litres of air for 1 litre of water; And the air needs to be cooled. That needs big fans and lots of power (air is heavy to move).
- Rain water collected in ponds/rivers may be contaminated/infested.
- Lack of fresh water in the ocean/islands is also an issue.
The two things that are available almost everywhere are air and sun.
It's reasonable to condense drinking/cooking water from air with solar energy in places that lack secure water. Not water for other purposes; you can't run a cooling tower, irrigate a field or an orchard, water a herd of cattle, or even grow a garden that way. But a household-sized dehumidifier powered by a household-sized solar panel can certainly make enough water to drink and cook rice.
On the other hand, if you live in semi-arid desert or any wetter biome, a cistern probably has a better cost-benefit ratio. Depending on your aquifer, a well may be better still.
They claim that this device with 1m² footprint could "well within thermodynamic limits" alleviate thirst for a billion people living in "tropical regions" (daytime relative humidity 30%-90%).
I already look forward to the debunk. It all seems very high-level. My money is on that these regions where the device would be viable do not actually suffer of lack of access to drinking water to start with - not to the tune of a billion thirsty people at least.
How about: Google found a way to alleviate thirst for a billion people and then decided it wasn't worth bothering with, stopped it being a project, and dumped the plans on Github? Norman Borlaug[1] won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to food production which is said to have fed a billion people, so I guess these authors had better things to do at Google than save a billion thirsty people and do Nobel level work?
From the paper: "Our assessment introduces a hypothetical 1-metre-square device with a SY profile of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatt-hour".
From the Thunderf00t video, checks out with a Google: it takes about 2,200,000 Joules of energy to evaporate 1 litre of water at 100C into steam at 100C, and so at least that much to condense 1 Litre of water from steam. There's 3.6MJ in 1KWh which is enough for 1.5 Litres. So already in the first paragraph of the abstract their upper estimate of 2.5 litres per KWh seems to be beyond thermodynamic limits (I could be very wrong, I'm no scientist; am I wrong?).
I'm not claiming any expertise or more knowledge than watching two videos just now, but their paper describes more than just solar powered condensing, with absorbent gels and materials involved as well (but still, wouldn't those have to take the same amount of energy out of the air to condense the water?). Their paper also shows desalination as being >100x more water per KWh than getting water from air.
Instead I think real engineering relies on tradeoffs, certain areas of a multidimensional space where an idea makes sense - and others where it doesn’t.
I see his style is divisive, but I don't think they are cursory, at least the two I linked; he's clearly put hours of time into making them, it's not just him talking and laughing recorded in 20 minutes.
People using his "rather cursory and dismissive" debunking to debunk other very different technology is kind of annoying.
Trash: "Elon Musk Invents UNDERGROUND Traffic Jam!" "Tesla Bot" No debunking. Small mindedness, pessimistic rant. Just says Elon will fail but not clear how he knows he will fail
His main point is usually about the massive unwarranted hype and blind hero worship around these concepts, and usually scams (the water stuff and other kickstarter projects).
The truth hurts, I guess.
The only thing that's relatively unknown is the "Tesla Bot" but considering that self-driving AI is still unsolved, let alone any kind of general intelligence, I don't think there's much behind that either.
You don't need to sink to citing YouTubers to figure out how much water air contains. You can just consult a standard psychrometric chart: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PsychrometricChart.S...
You can see from that chart that at, for example, 20 degrees and 30% relative humidity (which, if you're not aware, is pretty dry), you have about 5 mg of water per gram of air, or about 5 grams of water per kg of air, which is about 0.8 cubic meters (1.2 g/liter). So if you want to produce 10 liters of water per day for your family, you need to run 2,000 cubic meters of air through your dehumidifier. (Or a bit more because you can't reduce it to 0% humidity.)
That might sound like a lot, but it's per day, so it works out to 49 cfm, which is not "big fans and lots of power". If we're talking about a 300 mm square aperture it's 260 mm/s of airflow, a breeze you can barely feel, which requires a totally insignificant amount of power compared to the actual refrigeration involved. This is not going to fit nicely on your bicycle like in the fraudulent Fontus videos but it is entirely reasonable as a household appliance.
Solar electricity is free if you aren't using it for something else.
As for bacterial growth and filtering, yeah, that's a real design constraint, and it's one that HVAC systems have fallen down on in the past with disastrous results, but it's not some kind of unsolved engineering problem. Every air conditioner, sea voyage, and water tower deals with it. Here in Argentina just about every house has a rooftop drinking-water tank, where we control bacterial growth with chlorination, by impregnating the tank plastic with bacteriostatic agents, and by making the tanks opaque so algae can't grow. Thousands of years ago, mariners dealt with it by dropping a silver coin in each amphora of drinking water.
It would be a more difficult problem if a dehumidifier were warm and moist, but actually it's cold and moist.
As for the relative costs of tankers and electricity, well, that varies depending on where you are. Around here supply chains are so unreliable that I'd hate to rely on a weekly delivery from a water tanker in order to not die of thirst in 48 hours. (Fortunately, I live a few kilometers from the biggest river in the world. Water is not a problem here, though in places pollution is.)
The terminology you need to google for "the heat that is created when the water in the air turns into a liquid" is "enthalpy of vaporization of water"; around room temperature this is about 2.4 MJ/kg, so 10 liters/day is 24 MJ/day, which is 6.8 kWh/day, or, in SI units, 280 watts. However, remember that a heat engine operating at the Carnot limit is reversible. The coefficient of performance of a typical heat pump at these temperatures, the kind you might buy off the shelf at a big-box hardware store, is about 2, so you only need about 12 MJ/day (3.4 kWh/day, 140 watts). At a typical desert capacity factor of 25% this means you need a 560-watt solar array, about US$120 and three square meters. (California's utility-scale PV average capacity factor was 29% last I looked.) Very cloudy and polar places can have PV capacity factors as low as 10%, but they also have easier sources of drinking water. Like a rain barrel.
It's easier to store water or to "store coldness" than to store electricity, so you don't need electrical storage, you just need a heat pump sized for your peak throughput instead of your average throughput. Heat pumps are pretty expensive, so you might think this is a big problem, but the cheapest air conditioners I can find for sale around here are about 2000 watts, not 500 watts.
I've been noodling on desiccant-powered heat pumps for this and other uses, which may be able to reduce the cost of such systems, gather a larger fraction of solar energy than the 21% of high-efficiency PV panels, and provide built-in energy storage.
They cite a paper by Kim et al. that calculates the thermodynamic limits on the specific yield of atmospheric water harvesting as 5–50 ℓ/kWh (0.02–0.2 kWh/ℓ), which I suppose depends on the air temperature and humidity.
You say, whiloe going through the same calculations as Thunderf00t makes, to make the same points he makes. Including: how it is possible to do it, how dehumidifiers exist, what humidity means, how far out the Fontus design sizes were from being practically workable. 49cfm assuming you get solar power 24/7. Double or triple that to get it through while the sun is shining. I happened to see this[2] video of someone who put solar water generators on his house and reviewed it after a year. Check out from time 2:06 we can hear the fans running and see how "barely noticable" they are. (Insignificant power compared to refrigeration, I agree with). Said review video also includes a complaint about the water being unpleasantly warm to drink, because the whole system is on the roof of their house in the sun and the pipes all get warm.
> "Around here supply chains are so unreliable that I'd hate to rely on a weekly delivery from a water tanker in order to not die of thirst in 48 hours."
This comment is weird because I imagine you don't actually right now have a solar-water-dehumidifier providing water for your family so that you don't die in 48 hours when your water supply fails? If not, why not?
Right, but people reading my comment don't have to sit through a long video of some guy yelling at them to see that the calculations are correct. And they can see your correction to the airflow calculation immediately below my comment:
> Double or triple that to get it through while the sun is shining.
I'd say quadruple, given the typical 25% capacity factor for utility-scale PV in the desert in the US. (Quintuple or more if you aren't in the desert — but then you can just use a rain barrel.) I should have included that correction in my comment, and I appreciate that you took the time to point it out.
> we can hear the fans running and see how "barely noticeable" they are
It's all a matter of ducting cross-sectional area. 10k m³ per day is 120 ℓ/s; through a 100-mm-diameter round duct that's 15 meters per second, or 55 km/h, "near gale" on the Beaufort scale. The same 120 ℓ/s through a one-square-meter aperture is 120 mm/s, a wind speed where smoke from a chimney rises vertically.
> This comment is weird because I imagine you don't actually right now have a solar-water-dehumidifier providing water for your family so that you don't die in 48 hours when your water supply fails? If not, why not?
I don't live in the sort of desert where a solar dehumidifier would be a better option than a cistern; I live next to the widest river in the world. If I dig a hole in the sandy soil, after about three meters I have to stop digging unless I have an electric water pump running 24/7 to keep the hole from filling up with water. I don't know how things are where you're from, but here in Argentina, we have municipal water supplies run through pipes, supplied by water treatment plants. Unlike truckers, the pipes don't go on strike, call in sick, or get hijacked by asphalt pirates, and if a worker at the plant does, another worker can fill in for them. There's a 1000-liter water tank on the roof which takes about three days to empty when the water main does cut out. (Yes, sometimes that means it gets unpleasantly warm.) Dozens of grocery stores are a short walk away, replete with bottled water and soft drinks. We get 1200 mm of rain a year. In fact, it's raining right now.
A friend of mine lives in a nearby suburb that doesn't have a municipal water supply and where the river water is too polluted to drink safely. Her roof drains into a rain barrel.
My family members who live in semi-arid deserts without municipal water systems drill wells. (One of them actually has a dug well, the kind you could fall into, predating the municipal water supply.) The aquifers reached by the wells go lower every year, and sometimes you have to go and drill them deeper. In such places, civilizations like that of the ancestral Puebloans have collapsed during centuries of drought. People living in such places today without well-drilling equipment often spend many hours a week walking to water sources and carrying the water back home.
Many deserts today have no permanent inhabitants because of such considerations — you can only stay there until you run out of the water you brought with you. Burning Man is held in such a place, but not the driest one; there are places in the Atacama where rainfall has never been recorded. Theoretically a permanent settlement in such a place could rely on weekly water tankers driving in from wetter regions, but, for the reasons I outline above, only theoretically. Household-scale solar dehumidifiers are a much more feasible solution.
The more important reason my comment is weird is that it engages in factual and logical exploration of things that currently do not exist, but could, based on objectively verifiable information about the world. Your comment is weird in the same way, and I appreciate that. Let's have more weird comments.
These are mentioned in Table 1 of the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03900-w.pdf
In coastal California, redwood trees have been doing this since the Jurassic.
In the conditions you describe, fog nets commonly yield 2–3 ℓ/m²/day of water (20–30 nm/second), though experimental projects have reached yields over 13 ℓ/m²/day (150 nm/s): https://www.oas.org/dsd/publications/unit/oea59e/ch12.htm
Fog nets are easier to make and easier to repair, and consequently enormously cheaper. This makes them practical not only for drinking water but even for irrigation. They are more tolerant of damage, though they do need yearly maintenance. But they don't work on days without dew, and in some places, that's nearly all days.
I wonder how well it would work as a stand in for a desalination solution. Where there's all the water you want but it has salt (or other contaminant) that makes it impossible to drink. Seems to me that a beach would be the perfect place for it. At $150 price point it's a very good alternative to high price machinery.
Saving on machinery, or chemicals, might be important but $150 of materials for a device will buy you ~25,000 litres of water in bulk (in the USA).
If you want to support a civilization you better switch to something that can exploit the volume for increased efficiency, like an actual desalinization plant and a solar concentrator powerplant to run it.
The Sahara desert has a relative humidity of 25% (on average). Humidity tends to be much higher in deserts at night. Atacama can go to 0-2% _at noon in direct sunlight_, but as high as 50% at night.
The driest location on the planet is probably Antarctica. Yes, full of water, in the form of ice, but the air is dry.
Saving the planet one artificial intelligence at a time.
Other than that, I'm very excited about the propsects of air to water machines, I really really hope they become a lot more energy efficient.
Requires desalination, which is more complicated than simply filtering.
You can build a simple desalinator (aka, a solar still) with a couple bins, some glass/plexiglass, and access to sunlight. Preferably in an enclosed system to better contain heat and prevent water vapor from escaping.
No filters to replace, and it will run for as long as you feed it water.
Best link I could find to explain the process: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/61215
Even putting it back into the ocean isn’t simple. If you do it in one big batch, you would kill everything in that location for a while. If you do it slowly, that isn’t simple.
Make margaritas. Put some on your steak. Throw the rest back in the ocean if you want.
We're talking, maybe a couple pounds of salt per person per day. It's not an unmanageable amount.
You're not going to hurt the ocean by adding back a little salt - salt that you took out of it...
Yes, you will most likely affect cultures within the immediate vicinity of a salt dump site but they will regrow elsewhere. It's peanuts compared to the amount of dilution being caused all the time by normal freshwater runoff and ice cap melts.
The ocean is very large.
Considerations of efficiency and power consumption are relevant... but not much else. Generally such devices are either too expensive, too maintenance heavy, or utterly inefficient.
I'm not qualified to comment on, but I have found it interesting that it heats up the air (hotter air = can hold more moisture), passes the air through some material that's supposed to retain moisture, then cools it down with radiators. It seems that it would be more efficient in cold weather but would not perform nearly as well in a desert (where you need it to perform well as the moisture content is low during the day).
So maybe Mr. Thunderfoot will be able to debunk this too. If he can refrain from reusing Theranos and Boring Co footage.
The device may work great in one condition but certainly not always like the vendors might tout.
Given the triple point chart for water, the solar power for that day, and your humidity and temperature, you can compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere.
What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again. I'm counting 10 videos "debunking" the same idea of a bottle that extracts water from air (which is not what this project really is, it's not a based around a bottle)& he's been beating the same dead horses for 6 years now.
Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
Edit: Actually it's just weird at this point,his recent videos and their titles are so bizarre. It's either cheering at failures or Facebook tier thumbnails "Owning" Elon Musk. Yeah, I'll definitely stick with the Nature paper.
Yeap.
> Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
His videos are recursive.
You see, even videos having nothing to do with the subject at all, he will still find a way to include Hyperloop, Theranos and Boring Co. footage. Plus older videos. Like a house of mirrors.
They seem to be well reasoned. What are these misleading statements?
It is like Facebook and Internet.org, we keep allowing these tech companies to continue to build these trojan horses.
All Google has concentrated on is evil.
Hell, this project could be the aftermath of a Google PM gutting a team.