Swedish Machine Turns Sweat Into Drinking Water 105
New submitter Taffykay writes "Swedish designers developed the Sweat Machine to drain perfectly good drinking water from sweaty clothes! PR Agency Deportivo has teamed up with UNICEF to show off the machine at the Gotha Cup youth soccer tournament in order to highlight how many people around the world lack access to basic drinking water."
Dune much? (Score:2, Insightful)
Stillsuite?
Re:Waterworld! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Always mix uppers and downers. What could possibly go wrong!
Re:Waterworld! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody develops a stillsuit and you think of Waterworld? This site isn't what it used to be.
Are you sure about that? Waterworld was a saltwater world, as in: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. People have died of thirst in the middle of a the earth's oceans for lack of energy efficient water purification equipment so effectively you would have a pretty good use case for a stillsuit in Waterworld. Perhaps not quite as much as you would have on Arrakis but a stillsuit could nevertheless come in handy as emergency equipment since sweat is easier to recycle than seawater due to it being less saline (9PPT vs 35PPT) meaning that filters would probably last longer. A stillsuit would be even more useful if the material the stillsuit was made of also functioned as a big wearable solar cell to power the purifier since, according to several survival gurus on the various science channels, hand powered water purifiers actually cause you to lose more water than you gain by using such a device. Wearing the purifier and getting free energy by wearing it would be pretty neat.
Re: Waterworld! (Score:2, Insightful)
The cooling effect of sweat is the result of the evaporation of water on the skin, which uses thermal energy. The resultant loss of energy lowers the temperature of the skin, and a continuous flow of blood to and from the cooled area lowers the core temperature. So long as it allows the actual evaporation to occur, there's no reason it wouldn't work to condense it again. No broiler effect would occur.
You've only got half the thermodynamics equation there. If evaporation consumes heat energy, condensation releases it. So when the stillsuit recondenses the evaporated water into liquid water, it will create a nice toasty suit offsetting the cooling effect of the sweat.