Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs. so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry? you need to scale way way up, not down
A shot is ~ 35 ml to 50 ml, so one to three shots a day. :p
A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
81–90 of 106 posts
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#82Assuming it's an "all-weather" jacket I think it would be cool for it to spout out umbrellas when it starts raining, batman style, to catch rain water as well and drop it into pouches. Mp3 player would be great as well.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design seems reasonable. It seems like a scaled down version of this MIT one that uses similar principles: https://news.mit.edu/2025/window-sized-device-taps-air-safe-... So my vote is for working as expected.
Both devices handwave on how the cooling required to condense the water occurs.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#84Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#85Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#86I appreciate this style of writing. Straight to the point. No 12 paragraphs about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#87Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#88I appreciate this style of writing. Straight to the point. No 12 paragraphs about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
I know what you're saying and I agree, but now I really want to read a 12 paragraph story about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#89I appreciate this style of writing. Straight to the point. No 12 paragraphs about someone's grandmother falling in love in Italy with a plastic bag.
You're probably talking about cooking/recipe blogs? I need those 12 paragraphs and all the ads to get to the recipe. It's dopamine.
Re: A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
#90My first thought was “yay a stillsuit” - but this grabs moisture from the air, not the wearer’s body. So no. No stillsuit yet.
If they were externally powered you might get the numbers to balance, but they are explicitly presented in the book as powered by the human inside, which subtracts even more time from how long you're going to last in the desert before you die.
You can build a larger thing that recovers your water and cools you via some other method that uses external power, but I think you'd be hard pressed to ever beat just bringing more water with you. It won't be long before you're spec'ing a vehicle and not a suit... and then that vehicle should probably just bring more water, too.
On the more positive front, there is an interesting technology for potentially cooling the Fremen in the middle of the desert that could be based on something real: Paint that cools you by dumping your heat directly into space. Here's a video of it in action and what you might call a prototype of a "suit" that works like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKNOPlR2Yo While that YouTube video shows off someone using that paint on clothes, it seems pretty likely that that would not last very long. Paint on clothes is exactly as silly as it sounds for a long-term approach. But hypothesizing that someone could make clothing or suits based on this approach has the advantage of not being thermodynamically impossible, as evidenced by the fact that at least one substance with these properties actually exists. On Earth, that suit won't work in cloudy weather, but on Arrakis that's not a problem. Tapping the local human power to drive some circulation of either air or a bit of liquid cooling attached to some lightweight fins or some other sort of surface area on your back or something and you might just get a suit that could hugely extend your ability to loiter in a hot desert environment. You'd still need water, but much much less, or, the same amount could take you much farther.