cross-posted from: 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.
Lisan al-Gaib!
Device that can extract 1,000 liters of clean water a day from desert air revealed by 2025 Nobel Prize winner
Submitted 2 weeks ago by Innerworld@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Eccowave@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
criss_cross@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We need to harness Desert Power!
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Came here to say this but knew in my heart that it had already been brought in.
MolochHorridus@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yet again, nobody seems to be giving a thought what this means to organism that are living in the desert where this water is necessary for life.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As someone who has thought about it, could you provide the data that you used to come to the conclusion that the amount of water being extracted from the air has any appreciable effect on local life?
From my thinking…
Death Valley covers 7800km^2.. Atmospheric moisture is typically contained in the first 10km of air. So there is somewhere around 2.5 quadrillion cubic feet of air containing 114 billion gallons of water.
The average Atmospheric Water Vapour Residence Time is around 8 days The median is 5 days and Death Valley’s topography is a valley which would trap more moisture, but we’ll use the average instead.
This represents a moisture turnover rate of about 625,000 Liters/second (or 1.45x10^10 gallons/day).
So, one of these devices would consume .000185% of the moisture that enters Death Valley every day.
besmtt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
scitechdaily.com/america-is-sinking-28-major-citi…
Given enough people and time, we have a track record of messing stuff up.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If you plan on drinking the water, or cooking with the water, it’s going right back into the air after you pee or sweat and the water evaporates. Literally no damage done.
KaChilde@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I would think that ripping 1000L of water out of an environment in a day is going to have more immediate impacts than you eventually pissing on a cactus is going to fix…
Sure, the water isn’t “destroyed”, but it is being removed from an ecosystem that has evolved to use every last bit of water it can find to survive. It may not be immediately obvious, but it sounds just as damaging as removing 1000L of water a day from a lake and thinking the ecosystem will be fine because you’re going to sweat next to the dry lakebed.
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
…Science? ScInCe?
A WITCH! A WITCH!
BURN THE WITCH!
dukemirage@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well the damage is done and now we need that water.
Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You can’t really consume water especially if you take it out of the air. Worst case you temporarily barrow it till it evaporates again it’s not like the water is suddenly gonna be pumped out to the ocean or something.
KaChilde@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Do you think they are condensing 1000L of water to then just splash it on the ground where it was farmed? That water is going to people (or more likely companies) that are going to leave the ecosystem.
MilitantAtheist@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Wow.
HowAbt2day@futurology.today 2 weeks ago
That water was in its way to somewhere, though. What is that other area gonna look like now that this device intercepts the water?
SweatyFireBalls@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sounds like that other area needs to pull up on those bootstraps and make a water machine for its needs then.
This comment is brought to you by the sigma water machine, buy yours today and lock your grindset on hydration!
(Hopefully obvious but /s)
HowAbt2day@futurology.today 2 weeks ago
Are you on the Temu or the Amazon so that I can get some good boot straps and choke myself to ejaculation?
Hoimo@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Eventually all that dry air will end up above the ocean and absorb more water to balance the system. I don’t think it’s really an issue, we weren’t getting rain clouds from the Sahara anyway.
chunes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
same could be said about every shower you take and every toilet you flush
D_C@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
And every bond you break, every step you take
I’ll be watching you!!
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
They won’t probably export the water to europe or something.
I mean it’s not Nestle.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Atoco harnesses the power of AI to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and real-world implementation, transforming innovative research into scalable solutions. By integrating machine learning and AI with reticular chemistry, we dramatically reduce the time needed to develop, optimize and scale our novel nano-engineered reticular materials for carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting.
Bruh.
thatsTheCatch@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
This is likely not the Generative AI, LLM-slop type of AI you’re thinking of.
I hate generative AI. But other forms of AI and machine learning have been used for much longer and haven’t facilitated the building of ecologically harmful datacenters.
For example, AlphaFold, which is an AI program that can predict how proteins fold and is an incredibly useful tool.
I expect that the use of AI here would be similar: something trained for a specific purpose, not just generic generative AI tech like ChatGPT
Zwiebel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I sure hope so, the website just reads like generic corporate slop
ghost@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Reading that felt like my brain was trying to chew glue
Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
That’s what it said.
dil@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
I was researching ai before llms for a gen ed class, this isn’t the sensationalized type of ai, ai in medicine and sht is pretty cool. Hospitality ai is getting too good too fast tho. Robot hotels and restaurants would not be suprising.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/new-ai-tool-pinpoints-genes-drug-combos-restore-health-diseased-cells
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You’re conflating LLMs with Machine Learning and the broader industry of AI which have been solving real problems really well for a good long time.
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
This has been debunked before. To get 1000liter of water out of the air, the air needs to hold that much water.
Slashme@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
By gods. It doesn’t matter what technique you use, it’s still just a dehumidifier! The immediate limitation is the humidity of the air, and deserts aren’t known for being very humid!
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Here’s a picture of one of our tests generating water from air!
I can’t show much else but I can guarantee we did harvest the water from the air.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re absolutely correct that there has to be water in the air. However part of the trick to these panels is that they’re not steady state. They have a day cycle and a night cycle. During the night is where they do most of the work of absorbing the water from the air. Over a number of cycles I have overseen, the humidity in the air rises dramatically during the night. This helps these panels in terms of air extraction, since they work on a humidity basis, rather than a total-air-water-content. Think dilution or osmosis when it comes to the actual absorbtion mechanism.
When you do the math, it also doesn’t really seem like there’s alot of water in the air. Only something like 10-40 grams of water, especially depending on the outdoor temperature. We ran indoor tests with a panel a few sqm in size, and even in a small indoor warehouse, it was not able to dehumidify the warehouse to any significant levels. Maybe at most 5% humidity delta. However air is not static, and wind is always blowing, even when it seems really weak. There’s a huge amount of atmosphere above the ground, and unless the panels can absorb the water from the clouds too, the localized de-humidification that happens isn’t going to be significant. It’s like trying to suck up all water on a beach. The waves are going to replace it shortly enough.
So the one practical limit of these panels that is most frequently missed is the solar aspect. The MOF materials are like a sponge. You can absorb all the water in the air, but you still need to take the water of the MOF. The limit depends on the sensible and latent heat of the water, while in the sponge. MOF doesn’t actually really change the boiling point of water at all, so you’re really essentially creating a water distillation tower. In 1sqm of land, the most irradiance you’re going to get is about 1kw/sqm. 1kwh can boil about 10 liters of water. Taking that into account, over a 8 hour solar day. That means at most a single square meter of solar panel could generate 80 liters of water per day. It’s alot, but considering solar losses, glass loss, and thermal loss, more practical limits would probably be like 40 liters. The MOF material also required sensible heat as well, so already a huge portion of incoming solar energy is gone to heating the environment and raising temperature.
In all, you’d have to cover a huge amount of acres before this would dent the atmosphere in terms of humidity. The 1000 liters a day can really only happen when you have a large solar collection area, plus absorbtion surface area to back it up.
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There’s two impacts these panels could have. There’s the solar irradiation aspect, and the air humidity aspect of them.
In the solar irradiance balance, you have a net energy in, most of which goes directly to heating the ground. A panel would aim to absorb as much as that energy as you can, most of which would go towards a phase change of the material to release the water bonds. MOFs are extremely clean in terms of their re-usability, and don’t release any other compounds into the steam when released. Think of it like a condensation system, but without having to collect any water from any ground based source.
The air humidity is the other balance. In theory you could “absorb all the water out of the air”. In most business cases, these need to be deployed to more coastal regions, not literally smack in the middle of the desert. But in such cases, the atmosphere is highly dynamic and more or less equalizes total air water content in a certain microclimate. It makes it very renewable since the sun evaporates massive amounts of water from water bodies, which can be returned via either rain, or through water harvested through water-from-air chemistry.
The industry will want to buy water regardless of where they are, so when evaluating technologies, these provide much lower impact to the environment than any existing groundwater based system.
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
At mass scale, could taking enough moisture out of the air affect local weather patterns?
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Technically yes! To put it in perspective, there’s about 2.5kg of water in the atmosphere per m^2 of earth surface area. If you put enough panels across the earth, you could probably do a decent job at taking some of the water out of the air.
We have to look at another factor affecting the water in the air. As we take water out of the air, it’s not really a finite resource. Most water in the air generally comes from the sun evaporating the oceans. If we take the water out of the air, the sun will put the water back. There’s always a balance of humidity and quantity evaporated. When the humidity is lower, the sun would have an easier time evaporating more water due to the osmosis of the water from the source (ocean) going into the air. Osmosis is a kind of log graph, so even if the humidity is lower, the exponential tail means the solar evaporation and humidity pretty much balances out at the end of the day.
It’s similar thing to taking water from a river. If we take all the water from a river, can we dry up downstream? Yes! But considering the height of the atmosphere, it’s like standing at the edge of the river trying with a bucket and trying to scoop everything up. Unless these water-from-air harvesters can reach all the way to the clouds, we probably won’t dry anything up.
drmoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What is the current and mass scale potential price for this? Hundreds or thousands of dollars?
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
MOFs and other types of materials are actually a highly well researched topic. They’ve been around for decades! However in the current state of things, it’s kinda like battery technologies we see. It depends on the scale of manufacturing that these researchers can scale up production to.
Alot of time, the processes researchers do to manufacture small batches to produce a small prototype don’t work well when scaling up. The team I was working with had lots of trouble with it, but eventually settled into producing batches that would fill approximately a construction bucket worth at a time. Not a huge amount, but definitely a starting spot. It not mpossible to assembly line something like a millions of buckets a day, but at the same time your manufacturing costs go up alot.
There are many different competing kinds of water-from-air materials. These researchers use MOFs, but since they use metals, the cost to manufacture goes up significantly. Polymer based materials are a bit more “secret sauce” depending on the formulation, but they’re simpler in the sense you can use specific kinds of salts. The cost difference is something like 10x, so MOF really needs to produce 10x more value, otherwise it’s not worth it.
Since water is such a commoditized product, commercial prices are somewhere around a few dollars per cubic meter of water. When you design something that has to compete with existing products, you have to have a cost at, or less than existing prices. Either your panel has to be super cheap, or your water production has to be off the charts.
Let’s say a commercial water-from-air solar farm lasts for 30 years. Each day, 1sqm of panel produces 1 cubic meter of water. You’re only selling that water for $3 (approximate commercial rates). Over the lifetime of the panel, your income is 30years * $3 = $32850. It’s a big number! A realistic current figure for water production at best would hit 0.01 cubic meters of water. Holey cow! Now you’re actually making 1% of our original target, which is 3 cents per day, or $330 over it’s lifetime.
Selling anything that’s 1m^2 for only that price point is a crazy feat to achieve. I designed a number of systems that would try to enable that, but you must also factor in everything including installation and maintenance costs.
There’s billions of dollars thrown around to invest in these technologies. The only thing stopping it are the unit economics. You have to compete in an industry that is centuries old. But these can succeed, they can easily replace every single water filter in the world.
zephiriz@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
MOF’s sound like normal dehumidifier with extra steps. The way I see it and from what I understand from reading this.
Put MOF outside so it absorbs water from air.
Heat MOF up to boiling( 100C) to get the water out. ( as something lime squeezing it would probably destroy it, though would be cool)
Cool the water vapor back down using normal dehumidifier means.
Why spend the energy to heat the MOF up. Just cool the air down using normal dehumidifier means. It take a ton of energy to heat water up.
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
MOF behaves like a sponge, but wouldn’t feel like a sponge. Squeezing it would be nice, and could definitely eliminate the hassle of having to heat it up.
As for the energy, the thermodynamics of dehumidification basically requires an external energy source. To cool the air, you have to have a heat engine which removes the active ambient thermal energy out of a system. Such a system would look like a traditional dehumidifier hooked up to solar panels. The issue with that is the associated capital expenditure costs to build up such a system, as that already costs significantly more than “some random metal sponge” (assuming we could make it at scale).
For now, the only ways to cool the air down would be to use traditional refrigeration techniques, or peltier coolers. Peltier coolers are super inefficient, and traditional heat pumps require alot of energy. When in a low humidity environment, the coefficient of performance for heat pumps goes way down because the outdoor temperature could be very high, and the humidity very low. To reduce the air temperature to below dew point would mean cooling the air to near 0c, which is pretty much putting a freezer in a desert.
Solar energy is free, but absorbing it and converting it into useful work takes a good bit of engineering effort to make happen. What MOFs and similar materials can take advantage is being able to be left out in the sun like a sun dried tomato and covered in a black painted cover. Couldn’t be simpler!
tengkuizdihar@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
easy, use the salt pool to create salt batteries, now youre several step away from creating an energy plant in the middle of nowhere!
Hi_ImSomeone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Haha yes salt pools are fun, but wouldn’t always be the right kinds of salts required to create batteries. Unfortunately real chemical processes require very high purity raw ingredients, and using the reject water from an desalination plant probably wouldn’t cut it. Although if someone figured out how to make a battery out of that, that could have big potential! You’d get all the water and energy storage you would need.
homes@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
OhStopYellingAtMe@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
homes@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
Not a drop to split
Not a drop to SPIT
WTF, it was right there
Smh
cout970@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So… Another dehumidifier… We’ve been over this before.
Many times.
Many many times.
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s wild that people keep falling for this same scam.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hardly a scam. There’s nothing to insert money into.
This is just empty hype
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well, unless he sells the patent to Nestle, it’s COMMUNISM. Water is private property. /s
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s a dehumidifier. There’s nothing to patent that hasn’t already been patented.
sveltecider@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m always extremely skeptical of stuff like this
TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
zephiriz@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
shipping container size
That’s far smaller than I expected. I also don’t imagine it will be cheap. If they manage to make it less than $100,000 then I’ll be baffled. Less than $500,000 and I’ll be excited for the possibilities in my lifetime.
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 weeks ago
Yaghi’s mechanism can do this without a power source. It uses the wind and air for water input, then the sun to drive condensation and evaporative action.
Really interesting. This could totally transform many places on Earth.
kalkulat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Here’s a back-up, science paper on MOF from Nature with measured numbers. 8 liters per KG per day isn’t 1000 gallons until you get to 2 tons … but it’s about 200 liters per out of 25 KG … easily carried.
www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58405-9
"The effects of temperature, relative humidity, and powder bed thickness on the adsorption-desorption process are explored for achieving optimal operational parameters. We found that Zr-MOF-808 can produce up to 8.66 LH2O kg−1MOF day−1, an extraordinary finding that outperforms any previously reported values for MOF-based systems… "
lumettaria@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Don’t let Sam Altman know about this, his data centers about to have some upgrades /s
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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
Gsus4@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
a-z-animals.com/…/these-desert-beetles-drink-wate…
Dewcatchers, dewcatchers everywhere…
WanderWisley@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Where’s my noble peace prize for blowing up kids in an Iranian school? 🫲🍊🫱
Nomorereddit@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Sigh, ive read about prototypes that’ll solve water and desalination problems for decades. Heres how it goes.
1 Draft marketing plan 2 go pulling wshares for sale 2 Announce prototype and launch marketing strategy (ie plaster Nobel laureates name all over the product and drop adds on social media) 3 drive market value up 4 sell shares and get rich 5 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.
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
When I looked at condensers in the past, they weren’t incredibly energy-efficient. I suspect that it’s cheaper in the long run to do desalination and build a pipeline.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
This could be interesting for a mars settlement.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Doesn’t SoCal sometimes have negative humidity? 20% seems pretty high to say it works in the desert.
fenrasulfr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I wpnder how this will impact the environment.
69420@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Finally, I can achieve my dreams of becoming a moisture farmer.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Hope you enjoy a whiny nephew
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I swear to god if that kid brings up the academy one more time, just kill me
LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
What
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
He gets it from his father
DaddleDew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Peaceful living as a smoldering skeleton
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Watch out for the chicken-duck woman thing
Rakonat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Gonna head to Tashi Station every week?