How much water was used to make 1 jacket?
Like a life cycle analysis.
I understand it is about having access to water in dry places when you really need it, but still at some point these efforts forgot about something.
A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
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Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean we're talking about people who decided their life's work would be to run a recipe website so we already can't expect that much.
You don't know how many side projects they have. I had a recipe website at one time along with 50 other things.
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Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#103First someone declared the Butlerian Jihad. Now they've invented Fremen still suits. I want personal energy shields next.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#104Nearly all passive water-from-air devices described in articles are based on false claims. Peltier-based, desiccant/absorption/adsorption based, etc. All end up not working, or not existing. This has been common for ~10 years. Which category does this fall into?: - Fraud - Incompetence / misunderstanding that wasn't cleared up prior to publishing an article - Neither; this works as expected
It isn't passive. The paper states it needs to be heated to 60C and then you extract the water. They use a "DC power source" so you're still putting a battery into the jacket.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#105My first thought was “yay a stillsuit” - but this grabs moisture from the air, not the wearer’s body. So no. No stillsuit yet.
A Dune-style stillsuit is thermodynamically impossible. You can't both capture water and use that water to cool you via sweat evaporation. If you let it evaporate, it has to leave ; if you capture evaporated sweat you also recover all the heat that it took with it. Those suits are equivalent to going out into the desert with no ability to sweat, and rather than extending your life, would kill you much more quickly. I…
That's "passive daytime radiative cooling" for the curious. Supporting sweat, durability, non-toxic, existing textile tech, etc, gets hard. Or perhaps, like radiator-free ships in The Expanse, Dune just didn't want to show Fremen looking like butterflies.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#106Not specifically about drinking water or jackets, but I've often wondered why air-conditioning condensate is plumbed into the sewer instead of someplace useful. An A/C is a water-from-air device, and they run in much of the year in most homes in the southern US. The typical design that I've seen plumbs the main condensate drain into the sewer, and usually has an overflow that dumps somewhere harmless if the main line…
Since A/C (or similarly, dehumidifiers) function by moving a large volume of air over a set of chilled coils, one consequence is that dust tends to accumulate on those coils, and be mixed in with the resultant condensate.
If you're looking at grey-water applications (e.g., watering plants, flushing toilets), this isn't a major concern. But if you were interested in drinking that water, you'd have to run it through additional filtration steps, and it would tend to clog those filters pretty quickly.
(I discovered this tasting the water from a household dehumidifier tank some time ago.)
The constant dampness also makes the same condensate tend to hold mould or fungus, which may not be especially conducive to health, whether of humans, pets, livestock, or even plants.
Climates in which A/C is most likely to produce a large amount of condensate (humid climates) tend also not to be especially water-constrained, so that the optimisation of salavaging A/C water is limited at best.
Not to say it's never useful, but there are more considerations than might be initially apparent.