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XPrize's New Challenge: Turn Air Into Water, Make More Than a Million Dollars (cnet.com) 156

Posted by msmash from the innovations-and-rewards dept.
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.
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XPrize's New Challenge: Turn Air Into Water, Make More Than a Million Dollars More

XPrize's New Challenge: Turn Air Into Water, Make More Than a Million Dollars

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cdrudge ( 68377 )

      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)

        by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:30PM (#53141761) Journal

        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.

        • 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)

          by speedplane ( 552872 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:46PM (#53141873) Homepage
          The Wikipedia article is interesting. It mentions that one of the better existing devices generates 9,000 liters a year and takes up 6,500 sq. ft. of space. Assuming it scales linearly, 2,000 liters per day would require 527,000 sq ft of space, roughly ten football fields. If you could increase efficiency by a factor of 2 to 10, and similarly reduce costs, this x-prize challenge would be feasible.

      • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I guess we'll also need a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.

  • Have fewer babies. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:12PM (#53141613)
    Better solution: Have fewer babies.

    PM me for an address to which to send that $1M.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

        by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:21PM (#53141677)
        It's called education and prosperity. If it weren't for immigration (and immigrants having lots of children), countries like Germany and the US would have shrinking populations. Once a population reaches a better level of creature-comfort prosperity, and aren't living a hand-to-mouth agrarian lifestyle, they stop having so many babies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:14PM (#53141631)
    The next X-Prize will be "Turn water into wine".

  • That's a lot of water to generate in a day (Score:3)

    by H3lldr0p ( 40304 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:21PM (#53141669) Homepage

    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?

    • 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.

    • 2000 liters/day is a lot. About how much a U.S. family of 4 uses [data360.org]. You can make do with a lot less. India is around 130 liters/person-day. So I suspect this is more a one per 100-300 people concept, meant to provide potable water (drinking and cooking) so existing water sources can be used for things like bathing and laundry. That would help avoid things like the arsenic poisoning fiasco [hrw.org] caused by relief agencies drilling fresh water wells in Bangladesh.
    • My toddler uses 83 liters a day just to brush his teeth.

  • Wasn't this already done? (Score:3)

    by Eloking ( 877834 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:25PM (#53141707)

    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)

    by zamboni1138 ( 308944 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:29PM (#53141749)

    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.

  • Hardest Part (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stormy Dragon ( 800799 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:29PM (#53141753)

    The hardest part of this XPrize will be finding an interpreter who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.

  • Very similar to vapirators in most respects.

  • 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?

  • This has already kinda been done using the hydrogen internal combusion engine [wikipedia.org]. Not only will it create water from hydrogen and oxygen, it'll do work at the same time. The problem here is that the hydrogen can't just be plucked out of the atmosphere because it's so light it escapes, so you have to figure out where that's going to come from. You could buy it, but then you're not getting it from air.

    • 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.

  • Does Frank Herbert have a patent on this idea?

  • Patent it and make some real cash (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Somebody Is Using My ( 985418 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @06:20PM (#53142455) Homepage

    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.

  • Reading just the Slash Dot part (not the original article), it seems that India has a shortage of water so now they want to take it from the air. Well... fine. But that will dry out the air and if done to excess, will change the weather and ultimately, less rain fall will come down in other areas (or perhaps even the same area) of the water extraction plants. It just seems like a classic robbing Peter to pay Paul scenario.
    • 2000 Liters of water is 0.001621429 acre-feet or 0.0002 hectare-meters. This device's effect on rainfall would be hard to measure. It is literally just making it rain on a more convenient schedule.

  • how cool is this

    http://waterseer.org/ [waterseer.org]

  • I've got a solution (Score:3)

    by Charcharodon ( 611187 ) on Monday October 24, 2016 @09:47PM (#53143597)
    My solution:

    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.

  • Israel has been doing an excellent job of it. And India has more landmass directly adjacent to the ocean.

    https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]

    • I think doing this small scale dooms it to failure. As has been said above, producing that much water at that price would make the inventor another Bill Gates. Put the desalinators on the coast, use OTECS to power both the desalinators and the pumps. Sell the sea salt, harvest the fish from the OTECS runoff, profit.

  • 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

  • make the phone go into wifi hotspot mode where the ssid is an asymmetrically encrypted string that is recognized only by phones nearby running the same App, which try to connect to the internet themselves, or do the same thing .. Or an emergency wifi network maybe ?
  • Turning humidity into drinking Water at suitable rate/quantity is a) completely impractical, and b) ignores the real issue of water treatment.

    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 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]

  • I heard stillsuits [wikia.com] are efficient enough to allow someone to survive in a desert.

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