cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/59925291
The system can function in air with 20% humidity or less. But these 1,000 liter a day machines are not small, at around shipping container size.
Well, unless he sells the patent to Nestle, it’s COMMUNISM. Water is private property. /s
It’s a dehumidifier. There’s nothing to patent that hasn’t already been patented.
I used to work for a company making a similar device, the chemistry behind the technology is actually a well researched topic, and there are many kinds of various chemistries that can achieve a similar effect. Silica gel packets are the most common, a cheap solution that extracts moisture from the air, but is non-reusable.
These MOF compounds are useful because they have a fundamentally different method of collecting the water molecules. The framework traps the molecules inside, which can be later released with heat. Thermal solar power is free, but does require careful management of the rest of the device such that the material can get hot enough (usually around 100c), which also providing another surface to condense the vapour. I spent alot of time designing and testing such panels. They do work! I can post pictures of fishtanks of water later.
There truly couldn’t be much of a downside to these technologies. The real alternative is desalination, which produces hyper concentrated salt pools, or well water extraction, which is also bad…
The reason these technologies is usually due to the cost effectiveness to produce the material, and to build the enclosure around the material. The panels have to scale very large to get any reasonable about of solar power, plus the condensing and collecting mechanisms also add weight and cost. Water is not an expensive product, so at the end of the day, the economics don’t always work out favourably.
Happy to answer any questions about the technology.
Well… There would also have to be water to actually collect from the air. Thunderfoot made a really good video about these dehumidifiers when yet another one popped up on Kickstarter claiming to end water shortages.
What is the current and mass scale potential price for this? Hundreds or thousands of dollars?
There truly couldn’t be much of a downside to these technologies.
What you mean to say is “We don’t know what the downside will be untill these technologies are implemented and used for a long time and then studied.” Otherwise you sound like the well-intentioned-but-unhinged chemist that accidentally starts the zombie apocalypse at the beginning of the movie.
More of the same huh? Heres how it goes in 6 steps:
1 Draft marketing plan 2 go public w/some shares for sale 3 Announce prototype and launch marketing strategy (ie plaster Nobel laureates name all over the product and drop adds on social media) 4 drive market value up 5 sell shares and get rich 6 you’ve sold out and gotten rich, company dissolves because it was all a hype machine. (Not a real solution machine, or it’d have sold those real solution machines instead of purchasing ad space.)
Replace w crypto currency if u wish. Same lies.
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So… Another dehumidifier… We’ve been over this before.
Many times.
Many many times.
It’s wild that people keep falling for this same scam.
It really is. I’ve seen at least a handful of these on Kickstarter before, and before Kickstarter was a thing I’m pretty sure I saw something about “revolutionary new technology” like this in a TV documentary.
Where’s my noble peace prize for blowing up kids in an Iranian school? 🫲🍊🫱
I wonder if these guys realize that if you suck up all moisture from the air, it will be pretty dry and you will need the same amount of water to replace the water you displaced
I am guessing they are aware how their machine works. Air isn’t usually stagnant, if you have moving air that means moisture is replacing it.
If people keep reinventing the fucking dehumidifier I’m going to start beating these dipshits bloody. Or maybe I should just collect the old beater ones I see at estate and yard sales to make YouTube videos making fun of them. Regardless this is barely worth praise for an amateur engineering project let alone a nobel prize.
I’m always extremely skeptical of stuff like this
As you should be
Until the device is deployed in at least a few real live locations
I wpnder how this will impact the environment.
It would be cheeper and easier and less energy intensive to load a truck up with water and drive it to where you need it.
How many times do we have to fall for this garbage. Well I guess if your doing it to scam dumb rich people be my guest, but this shit is dumb.
Oh no, the same scam again, when will people realize that putting dehumidifiers in the desert, where there is little to none humidity in the air does not produce significant quantities of water.
You can claim that your solution produces thousands of liters of water, but in practice its obvious that you cannot extract more water than what’s already im the air, once you extract it, there is nothing left, it may work at first, but is not going to work continuously forever.
This is another example of a promised technology scam, pay me for the development and once it doesn’t work, disappear with the money. People keep falling for it for some reason.
There have been so many of these devices promoted in Kickstarter, dragons den, etc.
I’m highly sceptical, as so far scientists have told me there simply isn’t that much moist in the desert air to get even one liter of clean water per day. You simply cannot create water out of nothing.
This has been debunked before. To get 1000liter of water out of the air, the air needs to hold that much water.
This is a bit more serious than the old, frequently-debunked “dehumidifier in the desert” stuff, because it doesn’t depend on cooling the air to get the water out, but using a molecular sponge. If you pump enough air over that, you’ll eventually fill it up, and you can drive the water out by heating it up.
The guy behind this is a serious organic chemist, and his Nobel prize was actually for pioneering and developing these molecules, so it’s not a case of “Nobel prize winner does daft stuff about a subject he’s not an expert in”, either.
I’m still reserving judgement on whether this will be economically sensible, but I’m not dismissing it immediately, either.
Doesn’t SoCal sometimes have negative humidity? 20% seems pretty high to say it works in the desert.
Humidity cant be below zero, it measure how much water is in the air.
I think technically what we call humidity is actually relative humidity, so it can go below zero. Ture humidity can’t of course.
It really comes down to what you mean by humidity. “Dew point” can be negative, but humidity cannot.
“Negative humidity” is like saying “this glass has so little water in it, it has negative water”.
