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In what ways is this different from existing dehumidifiers? Form-factor and energy-efficiency I assume, but do they otherwise do the same thing?
This sounds like some sort of nanotech approach that causes the water to condense without needing a temperature change. It may not even require any power, if you can accept a slow rate of water collection.
My question is what kind of contaminants (or none!) this process picks up - If you're getting your water from a polluted atmosphere (say, LA), what kind of pollutants end up in your water? Or does it produce "ultra-pure" water, leading to weird health risks like hyponatremia?
Note, I said: if we do this on a massive scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good work. I imagine 1g/1m^3 is roughly what you'd expect - especially in a desert. If the extractor area is the size of the bottle's cap (2cm x 2cm = 4e-4m^2) then to get a litre of water (1e3 m^3 air) requires 2.5e6m of air to flow past it - If you want it full in a day that's 30m/s... hmmm... doesn't seem likely. However if the size of the extractor area is as large as the bottle (say 10cm x 10cm = 1e-2m^2) then a…
i think you're confusing collecting area with airflow cross-section. they're completely different things, unless somehow the air is blowing through the side of the (solid) bottle.
This may be a stupid question, but if the device requires power in order to move air over the water-collecting surface, would it work without power if it were outside in a breeze? Or is there something about the air flow in terms of its characteristics or location in/on the device that requires a manufactured flow?
I guess the airflow is to make it more efficient. In high humidities, you can easily collect 1 liter potable water with a 3m2 plastic sheet, a clean recipient, a hole in the ground and some sunlight, or just hot weather. It's an old survival trick. His apparatus is a kind of upgrade.
But imagine that, instead of a special water bottle, you have a poncho-sized sheet of coated plastic in the shape of a windsock with a coiled wire ring at the opening and a pouch at the end. If this could work like the beetle's wings and take water out of the ambient air, that would be interesting.
The device in India shown there produces 15 liters of water per square meter per year. The surface area of a bottle is, say, 500 square cm, or 1/20 of a square meter. That would produce about a liter in a year.
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2005-01-05gshar... talks of 0.042 liter per square meter per day, in extreme.y high humidity.
Clearly, some efficiency gains are needed w.r.t. those designs to effectively make the claim "water bottle tha fills itself". Whether that is possible, I don't know.