Just dig a well. Or grab some ocean water and filter it. Then build a big pipe. Problem could be solved worldwide in less than 10 years. But then what?
This is just advanced desalination using natural evaporation as input.
Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
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Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#12The concept has been debunked over and over, e.g. by Thunderf00t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw
I think you need more than just a YouTube video to "debunk" the nature paper that they have published and that is linked in their github. They seem to acknowledge that while there are some limitations it still is a viable source of water for a lot of regions.
What is surprising is that thunderfoot didn't lose his habit of repeating himself over and over again. I'm counting 10 videos "debunking" the same idea of a bottle that extracts water from air (which is not what this project really is, it's not a based around a bottle)& he's been beating the same dead horses for 6 years now.
Though to be fair, he's now more into into making misleading videos about SpaceX and obsessing over Elon Musk.
Edit: Actually it's just weird at this point,his recent videos and their titles are so bizarre. It's either cheering at failures or Facebook tier thumbnails "Owning" Elon Musk. Yeah, I'll definitely stick with the Nature paper.
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#13> Our assessment—using Google Earth Engine13—introduces a hypothetical 1-metre-square device with a SY profle of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatthour (0.1 to 1.25 litres per kilowatt-hour for a 2-metre-square device) at 30% to 90% RH, respectively.
The upper bound is nice, the lower bound kinda hurts. I can't tell if they are tracking the night cycle and harvesting when the dewpoint drops. Is this all calculation or is there a blueprint I am missing.
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#14If they’re giving it away for free, that must mean there is a fatal flaw they could never design around and are confident nobody else will either. What’s the point then? At least tell us why it’s a dead end.
Or that they just don’t see how it’s a market fit for their business.
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#15I really wish it wasn't Google, the spyware company that open sourced this. But rather a different company without all the bad and toxic disgusting ethics that Google has.
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#16If they’re giving it away for free, that must mean there is a fatal flaw they could never design around and are confident nobody else will either. What’s the point then? At least tell us why it’s a dead end.
Here's their summary blog post:
https://x.company/blog/posts/sharing-project-h2e-with-the-wo...
Allow me to snip a few quotes: "After three years of work, the team felt confident they could build a device that would produce water for $.10 per liter; however, it would have taken significant development work and iteration to prove feasibility at $.01 per liter. Additionally, the next phase of work for the project looked to be heavily focused on hardware integration and mass production expertise — not X’s sweet spot."
And:
"Given these factors, it became clear that X wasn’t best suited to take the work forward, and one of the best ways X could have an impact now on the problem of access to safe drinking water was to share what we’ve learned."
I have no idea what the prior state of the art of modelling viable areas for harvesting was (I presume this is probably where X made the largest contribution). As the blogpost identifies... X is not really the best group to tinker with large scale, low cost manufacturing prototyping and scale up.
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#17The concept has been debunked over and over, e.g. by Thunderf00t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw
A problem with his debunking at a fundamental level - when calculating how often the air temperature is lower than the ground temperature, he uses Canada and Wisconsin. I'm not sure those are representative of Africa?
I think the key message of all the debunkings is this: "it depends".
The device may work great in one condition but certainly not always like the vendors might tout.
Given the triple point chart for water, the solar power for that day, and your humidity and temperature, you can compute the max you'll condense from the atmosphere.
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#18If they’re giving it away for free, that must mean there is a fatal flaw they could never design around and are confident nobody else will either. What’s the point then? At least tell us why it’s a dead end.
Or that they just don’t see how it’s a market fit for their business.
This. They did excellent internal work, decided it's not for them, but did something good and want to share it. Just because it's not profitable for them doesn't mean it was a waste - they can use their new knowledge in other areas.
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#19If they’re giving it away for free, that must mean there is a fatal flaw they could never design around and are confident nobody else will either. What’s the point then? At least tell us why it’s a dead end.
The ad market for targeting the water deprived turned out to be smaller than expected?
Re: Google open sources solar atmospheric water generator
#20Just dig a well. Or grab some ocean water and filter it. Then build a big pipe. Problem could be solved worldwide in less than 10 years. But then what?
>ocean water Requires desalination, which is more complicated than simply filtering.
That depends on what you consider "filtering". You can desalinate using reverse osmosis, which pretty much is filtering.