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profdant139's avatar
profdant139
Explorer II
Apr 13, 2017

Harvesting water from air: dry camping gets moister?

This sounds like a hoax or fake news, but apparently it's not:

Article on new technology to harvest water from air

If (always a big if) this method pans out and becomes practical for consumer usage, it will be terrific for those of us who often camp far from sources of potable water. I don't know how close they are to mass-marketing this device.

16 Replies

  • The chew on a cactus bit is a farce. I eat cacti at least twice a week. Called Nopal. Use a squeezer on 500 lbs and get a gallon of bitter slimy liquid. Nopal cactus fruits SPINY! contain lots more liquid and hundreds of almost undetectable seeds. The fruits are called "Tunas".

    Never BS about the fishing to the people who live along the river.
  • If I'm stuck in the desert with no water I'll chew on Cactus until I can MacGyver myself back to civilization.:)
  • DrewE's avatar
    DrewE
    Explorer III
    They have invented a chemical dehumidifier, perhaps one that's somewhat more efficient than most existing designs. If there's no moisture in the air, or none to speak of, it will have a hard time collecting very much water. This would probably have more application in HVAC applications than anything.
  • Pons & Fleischmann. Every rig has a 100 kw reactor. Want -100F at Furnace Creek in Death Valley on the 4th of July? No problemo.

    They cannot even desalinate salt water efficiently. Shoot, California cannot even store water correctly. Another moving sidewalks moment...
  • Stop and think back how many press releases like this you've seen over the years. New batteries, new solar panels, new water extraction methods and on and on. But they rarely move out of the lab. It's a big jump from beaker scale in the lab to million pound scale in a factory and darned few of these 'wonder technologies' make the jump.

    For one thing these lab people are not engineers and have no idea what is needed to produce a successful product in the market.

    So as a Chemist in my working years who also went to engineering school I greet all these press releases with a yawn. When I even bother to read them. And when you do read them there are frequent red flashing warning lights in the descriptions. They rarely if ever say just how much energy it will take to make this thing work. I read one which announced the use of Scandium in a radical new solar cell (IIRC). A quick check showed that the worldwide production of that rare material would be exhausted in days if this scheme was ever put into operation.

    Anyway what these are, are attempts to pull in money in grants.

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