XPrize's New Challenge: Turn Air Into Water, Make More Than a Million Dollars (cnet.com) 156
An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: If you can turn thin air into water, there may be more than $1 million in it for you. XPrize, which creates challenges that pit the brightest minds against one another, is hoping to set off a wave of new innovations in clean water -- and women's safety too. The company announced its Water Abundance XPrize and the Anu & Naveen Jain Women's Safety XPrize on Monday in New Delhi. The first competition will award $1.75 million to any team that can create a device able to produce at least 2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere, using completely renewable energy, for at most 2 cents a liter. Teams have up to two years to complete the challenge. India is at the center of the world's water crisis, with access to groundwater depleted in some northern and eastern parts of the country. Water has become so scarce in India that natural arsenic has infiltrated the soil and water in certain regions. While there are systems that can currently extract water from the atmosphere, many of them aren't energy-efficient, or generating enough water. "We know that overuse of groundwater resources are causing the water crisis and it's only getting worse," said Zenia Tata, XPrize's executive director of Global Expansion. The $1 million Women's Safety XPrize calls for an emergency alert system that women can use, even if they don't have access to their phones. The alert would have to be sent automatically and inconspicuously to emergency responders, within 90 seconds, at a cost of $40 or less a year. The device would have to work even in cases where there's no cellphone signal or internet access.
Re:Air into water (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with "free hydrogen" is that it floats. You start to see it about 70km up, and even then it is extremely rare because it is so light that it can get knocked out of Earth's gravitational well pretty easily by our solar wind.
So no, just burning "free" hydrogen just floating around in the atmosphere isn't possible. Good thing too, or else the atmosphere on our planet would be pretty much Hindenburg-like, which would make for a very crispy planet every time there was lightning storm.
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Good thing too, or else the atmosphere on our planet would be pretty much Hindenburg-like, which would make for a very crispy planet every time there was lightning storm.
Only once, I suppose.
Re: Air into water (Score:1)
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"but actually turning free hydrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere into water."
What planet are they from?
Jupiter? Saturn?
Or the next planet out after that
I
Re:Air into water (Score:5, Informative)
TFA gives the example of India running out of ground water. The reason for this is that India provides FREE ELECTRICITY to farmers, giving them no incentive whatsoever to conserve. So they run their pumps 24/7, over watering their fields and depleting aquifers. Ending these idiotic subsidies would do far more good than wasting even more power to condense humidity out of the air.
It would be better for both farmers, the environment, and the Indian economy to replace power subsidies with unconditional money transfers. Then the farmers could decide for themselves what to spend the money on: possibly electricity, but more likely efficient pumps, drought tolerant seeds, fertilizer, etc. Power and water waste would decline, crop yields would improve, and rural incomes would rise.
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The reason for this is that India provides FREE ELECTRICITY to farmers, giving them no incentive whatsoever to conserve.
Just between us Chachalacas, one might think, just possibly, mayb kinda sorta.....
They have too many fucking people!
But don't worry, there is no problem at all, because Godwin is always wrong.
That's the thing, Earth can accomodate an infinity of people. Removing enough Oxygen to make water to hand to a few billion people forever is just about the smartest idea ever.
But here is the thing. does India or any other country have the right to remove huge amounts of Oxygen from the atmosphere?
The
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Not moisture from air, but actually turning free hydrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere into water.
Isn't that called a fuel cell?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Refrigerant based dehumidifiers produce about 2 liters per kilowatt hour (at least in a somewhat damp basement -- probably less efficient in drier areas). So that would be over 40 megawatts of continuous input needed to get 2000 liters per day. Or, at 10 cents per kilowatt hour, $100 of electricity per day to reach that target. Or about 5 cents per liter -- not too far off from the 2 cents needed, and it can be renewable if powered off wind or solar. But then you need to factor the capitalized cost of t
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Or about 5 cents per liter -- not too far off from the 2 cents needed
Thanks for doing some quick math, but "not far" is not how I would describe the challenge... It is not an order of magnitude (10x) of improvement, but even taking your numbers that still means the new device has to be over twice as efficient in a humid area and probably closer to 4 times as efficient in a much less humid area.
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There's $1.75 million on the line, so instead of posting anonymously to Slashdot you should get to work.
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Re:Air into water (Score:4, Informative)
$44k + $6k fudge factor. I could easiy do it for less than $50k assuming a semi-humid environment. Or a flooded laundry room.
Note that's an off the shelf solution, I'd bet tht this could be reduced by 20% with a more targeted design (no inverters in the system and dc motors in the dehumidifiers)..
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What do you do with all the heat? And wouldn't you need a very large volume of air?
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Magical devices are reserved for women. Men aren't so picky they demand to be able to automatically and inconspicuously send an alert from inside a faraday cage.
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There is nothing magical about a Personal Locator Beacon [outdoorgearlab.com] (this one was highly reviewed. I am not getting kickbacks. I am not getting referrals. I do not own one.) The $300 buy-in price translates to less than $40/year if it lasts ten years, which it might.
On the other hand, it would be totally fucking useless even if it sent a ping straight to your local PD saying you were being raped, because by the time they show up, it will be over.
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We already have this device, although it will cost you a bit more than $40...
It's called a gun....
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> Interesting since they want cops to have a monopoly on firearms while they accuse them of racism and abuse.
Nice burn...
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> Interesting since they want cops to have a monopoly on firearms while they accuse them of racism and abuse.
Nice burn...
And lit the Strawman on fire.
But of course, we live in a country where a background check is considered calling a a ban on all guns according to some friends.
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Let's help make it a bit clearer. Let's say you're the average US male height, weight and build - 176cm / 59" and 83kg/184lbs and a bench press of 165lbs. Picture an environment where everywhere you go, you're surrounded by men who average 192cm (64"), 105kg (231lbs) - with the weight difference being primarily muscle - with a bench press of 400lbs. On average. Basically, the average person around you is a NFL linebacker. Now picture that a good number of them are sexually attracted to you. That they'
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Right. Keep denying our reality.
Isn't this like an ancience technology (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser) [wikipedia.org]
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Well, go ahead and submit you idea. Building a 9000 m^3 stone mound doesn't seem very practical. And all the other implemented methods on that page with passive or renewable energy sources appear to make only a fraction of the 2000 liters the contest aims for.
Re:Isn't this like an ancience technology (Score:4, Insightful)
The 2000 liter requirement is kind of a deal breaker. If I have a 1 meter square device that can produce 50 liters a day, that would be way better than a 50,000 meter square device that makes 2000 liters a day.
And in some places, gathering 2000 liters of water from the air is nearly impossible, in other places, it is almost trivial.
And water isn't always the problem, it is usually "clean water" that is the problem.
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I tried to see if there was any more information on the xprize.org site about their requirements - but it really does seem pretty sparse. They don't say how that $0.02/liter is to be amortized over time if it's to include capital costs, or if it's only variable cost. They don't say over what kind of area the device can be deployed (e.g. what is its footprint?), doesn't have relative humidity requirements, or anything like that.
Maybe it's locked behind the registration page?
Re:Isn't this like an ancience technology (Score:5, Informative)
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And in some places, gathering 2000 liters of water from the air is nearly impossible, in other places, it is almost trivial.
In Whales its almost unavoidable.
FTFY
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Well, go ahead and submit you idea. Building a 9000 m^3 stone mound doesn't seem very practical
Tell that to the Egyptians. They could do it I bet. And with slave labor, you can easily meet the price target.
droids (Score:1)
I guess we'll also need a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Have fewer babies. (Score:4, Insightful)
PM me for an address to which to send that $1M.
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Sex is free, and it feels good.
I don't see how you can convince a billion, double-digit IQ people to stop.
Re:Have fewer babies. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Whatever the solution is, it has to cost less than 2 cents a liter. Until they run into the next resource limitation.
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If you do the things that make you a first-world country, you'll have fewer babies and need fewer resources (like water) so you don't have to chase your tail trying to squeeze water out of the air. As usual, everyone is so paralyzed by political correctness that their afraid to point out that places like India are suff
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We need both. The education programmes that reduce the birth rate are proven, e.g. Bangladesh went from around 9 in the 1960s to 2.2 today.
The problem is that there is a huge amount of lag before we notice the world population levelling off. New parents today are from a generation that had more children, and their parents are from generations where 9 kids were the norm. And they are all living longer, so there is more overlap of their lifetimes.
At the current rate we are on target for stability around 11bn
Jesus! (Score:5, Funny)
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I did that years ago...
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Turning lead into gold is easy, but it's so expensive that really all you're doing is turning gold into less gold.
obligatory star wars reference (Score:2)
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Dude.
No.
http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Win... [wikia.com]
That's a lot of water to generate in a day (Score:3)
It's a little over 83 liter of water per hour, presuming this is meant to be running 24 hours a day. So I'm going to guess this is meant to generate enough water for more than a single family. Maybe a good portion of a village. The details are light in the linked article. What's the target area's relative & absolute humidity and the season? Is it even possible for certain areas of the world to do that?
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You need to process a lot of air to get that much water out. At 100% humidity, there is only 0.000017 liters of liquid water per liter of air at room temperature. So you need to process 4,882,353 liters of air per hour to extract 83 liters of water per hour. And if you have less than 100% humidity, then its worse.
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Wasn't this already done? (Score:3)
I'm I missing something or this have already been done? There's even a Billboard that filter the humidity in air to make drinkable water : http://bigthink.com/design-for... [bigthink.com]
That's not the hard part (Score:5, Funny)
Getting water out of the air is easy.
The hard part is dealing with Sandpeople. They will steal your car, your droids... hell, even your wife.
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Hardest Part (Score:5, Funny)
The hardest part of this XPrize will be finding an interpreter who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
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So, can you finance the purchase of a Glock and a few boxes of ammo for $40 per year?
Well... (Score:2)
Over a few decades... sure. [glockstore.com]
The "inconspicuousness requirement" [silencershop.com] might make that more like three or four decades.
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Why not build something similar to those things they have on boats that you set off if you get stuck out at sea and need rescuing? Something that, when activated, sends a unique identifier (to identify who's device was set off) to a satellite along with some GPS coordinates.
My first job was programming binary loadlifters (Score:2)
Very similar to vapirators in most respects.
What? (Score:2)
Maybe I'm not thinking this thing through, but do we really have so much extra air that we can start willy-nilly turning it into water?
And wouldn't a better solution be to just start turning people into Soylent Green?
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Actually, maybe we should just start extracting water from people... [youtube.com]
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Check with me during half-time of tonight's football game. I'll fill a few jugs for you.
Problems with this (Score:2)
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Forget Hydrogen. If I remember correctly 1 gallon of Diesel fuel generates 4 gallons of water. Now you just need to figure out condensing and cleaning.
You also get a lot of usable work out of it as well.
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Dune? (Score:2)
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Ideas cannot be patented, only implementations can.
Patent it and make some real cash (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one who thinks that anyone who can make a device that pulls "2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere, using completely renewable energy, for at most 2 cents a liter" would be far, far better to patent the machine and then sell it themselves? The device they are describing would be so miraculous - not to mention useful - that the $2 million prize would be small change to what the inventors would get if they commercialized it.
I mean, I'm all for encouraging scientists and don't think that science should only be about making money, but for what they are describing, they really ought to be offering a /real/ prize rather than what would be comparative pocket-change to the device's actual value.
I mean, I read that the cost of desalinization in California costs ~$10,000 per person (and that's just for the cost of the building plant, not the power or the distribution); to desalinate enough water for the whole state would cost close to $400 billion dollars. A machine that could create water for 5 people (2000 liters is a little more than 500 gallons; Americans use about 100 gallons of water a day) for $40 a day would have municipalities breaking down the inventor's door. XPrize really should offer remuneration that reflects the importance and value of the invention.
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http://www.redferret.net/?p=10... [redferret.net]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Isn't this not really solving the root problem? (Score:1)
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this is it (Score:1)
how cool is this
http://waterseer.org/ [waterseer.org]
I've got a solution (Score:3)
Step 1 go up to Home Depot.
) Step 2 buy a length of hose for $10
Step 3 connect one to each of the hundreds of millions of air conditions that dot the planets.
Step 4 collect the condensation instead of letting it run down the drain.
Use said water for toilet flushing, growing crops etc.
I get 5-10 gallons a day off my AC during the summer. It probably averages out to 2 gallons a day for the whole year.
That would be 200 million gallons of water per day or 73 Billion gallons per year assuming my 2 gallons a day as the average multiplied by 100,000,000 homes. sized air conditioners globally. 1 Billion dollars to retrofit 100million air conditioners. The hoses would last 10 years.
Price per gallon. 1.4 cents per gallon
Oh wait they wanted in Liters. ok. That would be 0.36 cents per Liter. 5.5 time under what they wanted.
Pay up bitches.
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That is big news. Someone needs to tell the UN and all their little SJW, tree hugger buddies about it.
You know though an extra 73 Billion gallons per year in the first world will have an impact on the 3rd. The tech for water capture will be made cheaper and make it's way into the 3rd. The extra food and manufacturing that will come with a drop in the price of water will result in more go
why not just desalinate? (Score:2)
Israel has been doing an excellent job of it. And India has more landmass directly adjacent to the ocean.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
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did they google this? (Score:2)
If the X-Prize folk searched "atmospheric water generator", they would find multiple commercial products that run on electricity. Then, they would simply need to set up a solar panel system, and they'd be done.
I live in a desert, and have looked into getting one of these systems. The (commercial) system I'm looking at has a cost that would meet their guidelines for production and cost, provided a working life of about 20 years. That's... not unreasonable.
Why don't we all use this technology? Because I'm
in case of no cellphone signal or internet access (Score:2)
Red Herring (Score:2)
Here is a case in point [youtube.com]
The more you watch that video, the more you'll realise how unrealistic it is to turn humidity into water. The video covers a specific case, but the generalities are true enough for any approach (e.g. conservation of energy)
Also, as pointed out in the video, most people (and animals) gravitate to and settle near a supply of water (even in
Why? (Score:1)
Why waste time turning air into water when we already have the holy grail of turning air into alcohol?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
Recycle the water instead (Score:2)
I heard stillsuits [wikia.com] are efficient enough to allow someone to survive in a desert.
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Umm, might want to look at what the women want. I guess it takes a man to say: get a dog.
But hey. If a woman can't keep a man, then there's no betting that she'll be able to keep a dog either.
Oh yeah, how could I forget: also she has 90 seconds. How silly of me. Even with 90 seconds, she needs help. I can't think of a place in my life where 90 seconds wouldn't already be enough for me to get away. But I've got 90 seconds, a dog, friends, a community, a cell phone, money, and a strong woman by my side.
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Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas