Couple wins $1.5min XPrize for invention to make water out of thin air

[edy]

  Why does this kind of invention not seem new to me? Haven't we seen a bunch of stuff on IndieGoGo and KickStarter already unproven to work to any reasonable degree by Dave and others? Then again, I guess these are "industrial dehumidifiers" using conventional techniques and are amply powered to do the job....

Here are some links to articles:

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/couple-wins-1-5-million-xprize-with-invention-that-can-make-water-out-of-thin-air

https://www.xprize.org/articles/waxp-grand-prize-winner



I wonder if "out of thin air" was to be taken literal or as an expression... and how thin air would affect moisture content and the ability to condense water out of it (and the capacity it would even have).

"competition parameters of extracting a minimum of 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere using 100 percent renewable energy, at a cost of no more than two cents per liter."


(2 cents per liter x 2000 liters = 4000 cents = under $40 cost daily)
(in my area, off-peak 8.9 cents per kWh, so for 4000 cents you get ~450 kWh)
(divide by 24 hours, get 18.75 kW used per hour, or 18,750 Watts running 24 hours a day)

...and from here.... https://www.explainthatstuff.com/dehumidifier.html

"the big machine will extract 50 liters in one day and use 24kWh of energy in the process"

Jump that up to 500L and it is 240kWh per day, then up to 1000L is 480kWh... So already over the amount listed by the competition (at the cheapest rate mind you in my area, but not necessarily the cheapest cost available globally and certainly not if solar panels are used).

It sounds like you will need about 960kWh per day to extract 2000 L. To do so at 2 cents a liter you will need to spend less than $40 a day to obtain 960kWh. I don't know what size array you will need but that sounds like an awful lot and not consistent supply. How many Tesla Powerwalls do you need?

So if you link up enough solar panels to a bunch of batteries to charge them up during the day, and run the dehumidifiers off them at night (when the temperatures are cooler), yes you can extract enough water. But how much energy, how many dehumidifiers, how big a solar array and how many batteries do you need? Or are they using a generator powered by biofuel? Very vague.... I'd like to know what "innovation" has allowed them to pull this off other than just scaling in size.

 

[nctnico]

Reading the article their system comes down to burning bio-mass and let the resulting water vapour condense.

[edy]

Reading the article their system comes down to burning bio-mass and let the resulting water vapour condense.

So we are supposedly in an arid area with little water and probably minimal vegetation as a result (think desert) and the solution is to burn everything you can get your hands on to produce water vapour. How did that biomass end up there? If it grew and you have some dried up grass laying around, did it not once have water to grow with? What about the CO2 emissions from this process? How clean is the water?

I'm not sure I understand the advantage here, we need more information about this process...

Here is what I am seeing:  http://www.skysource.org/#skywater

A dehumidifier hooked up to some tanks....  Am I missing the "magic" here?



That grass and hill looks to be fairly green, he is on a hill. Surely they could built a water capture system for when there is rainfall (channeling it into large barrels or tanks and then purifying) or dig into the side of the mountain for an aquifer.



*Water output is dependent on environmental factors such as relative humidity and temperature

Additional Technical information

Power Supply: 220/50-60Hz/Single or 380/50-60Hz/3 Phase
Refrigerant: R 407C
Working Conditions require the following
Temperature Range of 65°F - 105°F
Relative Humidity Range of 40% - 99%

Somebody please do the math and how we get 2000 L per day and what energy price will have to be to get it for under $40 a day (assuming 2 cents per liter). Notice also the asterisk * and we get back to that age-old problem in that the places that need water most are the driest and the best efficiencies to these machines work in high humidity environments, 40-99% in this case. Here's a dry place in comparison:

[coppercone2]

It seems like this would be useful to space travel and colonization of other green worlds.

maybe on american plains and stuff too, this way you don't need to dig and fuck up aquifers to get to water.

[nctnico]

Reading the article their system comes down to burning bio-mass and let the resulting water vapour condense.

So we are supposedly in an arid area with little water and probably minimal vegetation as a result (think desert) and the solution is to burn everything you can get your hands on to produce water vapour. How did that biomass end up there? If it grew and you have some dried up grass laying around, did it not once have water to grow with? What about the CO2 emissions from this process? How clean is the water?

I'm not sure I understand the advantage here, we need more information about this process...

It seems you got more info. It seems like the Fontys self-filling water bottle allover again    I feel a new rant video from Dave coming up...
Spending the energy on a pump seems much more sensible to me. A pump can be hand powered too if you just need some water for drinking and cooking.

[sibeen]

https://www.xprize.org/prizes/water-abundance

The site details where the competition rules were laid out.

extracts a minimum of 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere
has a combined operating and capital cost of no more than 2 cents per liter
uses 100% renewable energy

And on the FAQ page we have:

"There are a few technologies that exist in the market that can extract water from atmosphere. However, these technologies are either very slow or very expensive. There is also a serious lack of private investment for innovation in this space. Through the Water Abundance XPRIZE, we are incentivizing teams around the world to come up with a disruptive, scalable solution that transforms fresh water access, catalyses the market and pushes existing technologies."

OK, we should all point and laugh as they are using a word like 'incentivizing', but it does appear that the prize was set up for the development of a efficient dehumidifying system so you cannot really complain when a dehumidifying system wins the prize.

[edy]

Ok, the National Post article that I linked in the first post says this:

"They prevailed by developing a system that uses shipping containers, wood chips and other detritus to produce as much as 2,000 litres of water a day at a cost of no more than 2 cents a litre."

Then it says....

"Certainly in regions where you have a lot of biomass this is going to be a very simple technology to deploy"

Now a bit more into the technology:


"They settled on creating little rainstorms inside shipping containers by heating up wood chips to produce the temperature and humidity needed to draw water from the air and the wood itself. One of the fascinating things about shipping containers is that more are imported than exported, so there's generally a surplus"

"And if you don't have wood chips to heat them with, coconut husks, rice, walnut shells, grass clippings or just about any other such waste product will do just fine."



Ok... so time to figure out what exactly is happening. It obviously is not just condensation of humidity from the air using a cooling process. It also doesn't seem to be a simple combustion byproduct of taking hydrocarbons and producing water and carbon dioxide... then again, if it is, how does thing win the "green environment" condition? I don't think they are burning the biomass.

Either way, it seems a bit crazy to ship a bunch of woodchips and containers to places to make water when you can just ship the water directly. Places that have lots of "biomass" and "detritus" sitting around... yet a shortage of water? They claimed in the article it could be used for disaster relief situations. Not sure this is the best approach either.

Does anyone have a clue what they heck they made and why it was worth giving them a $1.5 million Xprize?

[edy]

Ok I think I have an answer here, from this page:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbddw8/artificial-clouds-in-shipping-containers-may-be-the-solution-the-worlds-water-crisis

By the way, this "mock up" is ridiculous and looks like something you'd see on an IndieGogo page:




And I quote from the above article:

"The winning Wood-to-Energy Deployed Water System (WEDEW) basically creates artificial clouds inside a shipping container-sized box and then condenses them to a drinkable liquid. The system works by pulling in warmer air from outside the box and combining it with cold air inside, producing condensation.

To power the system, the team turned to burning wood chips and other biomass, a renewable source of energy that has the added benefit of producing heat. The extra heat and humidity allowed the system to extract even more water from the air.

In places where biomass isn’t readily available, the WEDEW can be converted to run on solar power."



Ok, so from the first paragraph it sounds like they ARE just condensing warmer air from outside the box, cooling it and collecting condensation. The second paragraph suggests they are getting the energy from burning organic matter, a "renewable" source of energy, and feeding some of the exhaust through the condenser as well (how much soot and other garbage will get into your water who knows), and then finally in the 3rd paragraph it says when biomass isn't available, you go to SOLAR.... And there you have it!       

Really? Is that the winning solution?

Is this a refrigerant-based compressor/condenser/evaporator loop (like a basic air-conditioner or dehumidifier) that is powered by either a biomass-burning system or solar? How would you power a compressor on biomass? Are they using some kind of wood-chip burning engine to power a generator which then produces the electricity needed by the dehumidifer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator

Now I see why it is good for disaster relief. They drop a few of these WEDEW containers ("We Dew") on a hurricane-devastated island, and then people chuck the remnants of their houses and shacks and everything else they can find (uprooted trees, etc) into the machine and trade it for drinkable water. Does a dual job of cleaning up the disaster mess and providing water at the same time, in places that are likely very humid to begin with, but surrounded by mainly salt-water, and where it is likely to rain several times a day anyways. 

[Marco]

Anywhere you have water you can put >>100x of that water through RO for the same energy.

[cdev]

Don't you need cooling, not heating, to condense water out of moist air?

Just saying...

Lets just put it this way, Ive seen my share of schemes and schemers and there are more and more of them all the time.

The particular economic conditions we're living in these days seem to be attracting them, like flies to poop.

Red flags go up for me whenever I see people promising to do things that many others have tried to do before and failed.

Not to say that revolutionary breakthroughs dont happen, they do, but they rarely happen all at once, they happen bit by bit.

[edy]

Maybe someone can get to the answer but the news that I could gather so far doesn't seem to give much detail... Either because the media is ignorant of the engineering principles or they are regurgitating the press release from Xprize.

Is it using a refrigerant based loop for cooling a surface to condense humidity out of air or is there something from the biomass? Are they using biomass purely as an energy source like solar or gaining water from the combustion also by running exhaust from their wood chip burner powered electric generator past their condensers as well?

[amyk]

It sounds like they're burning biomass to generate CO2+H2O and energy and using that energy to power a refrigeration dehumidifier that condenses the combustion products. Seems doable in theory, but I'd be more concerned about what else gets condensed out of the air too...

[SiliconWizard]

Where does the CO2 go?
I thought it was a bad idea to release too much in the air?

[Cyberdragon]

Where does the CO2 go?
I thought it was a bad idea to release too much in the air?

They probably had to plant a forest to gobble it up.

[StillTrying]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Randall_Hertz
https://davidhertzfaia.com

[edy]

So basically if you can't get enough water out of the air, get it out of burning sh&t....





The problem there becomes with complete combustion your resultant gases are no longer combustable. So you must figure out a way to take the heat directly and convert it to electrical energy (to drive your dehumidifier). Meanwhile you can pass your combustion products through the chiller and pull out water at least.


If you are not burning it completely, like in this example:




... then you will gasify your wood chips by creating partial combustion products (by limiting oxygen but allowing heat to "aerosolize" the wood) which can actually feed into a compression-cycle engine that will burn the remaining partial products to completion (in an oxygen-rich environment) and power an electrical generator:






At least that is my understanding of how to use the biomass as an energy source, and potentially also gain additional water from the combustion products. Either way, if you have DRY WOOD to burn, you aren't pulling water directly out of it... you are chemically converting it to get water, and you would still need an energy source to drive your cooling system... either from the wood itself (via a biomass engine) or solar. I don't see any other way. And yes, you will get a ton of CO2 release but it is "renewable" because the trees will regrow. Heck, "coal" is also technically renewable because in a million years you will have plant matter that has died and packed into the ground form again.


Here's an old wood gasifier engine that is sort of a "lost technology" since everyone uses fossil fuels... but back in the day when gas was being rationed people were driving their cars around using this:







So if they can drive a small generator or the compressor directly with this thing, they could cycle the refrigerant this way through the system, creating the necessary cooling and also getting water both from the air, and also probably the vast majority of the water coming from the actual biomass combustion itself. So they are not "pulling water out of thin air", they are pulling water out of burning hydrocarbons and spewing out tons of CO2. I wonder how well this system would work if they could not get combustibles and had to rely only on solar and the actual humidity in the air?

[SiliconWizard]

Where does the CO2 go?
I thought it was a bad idea to release too much in the air?

They probably had to plant a forest to gobble it up.

You mean a forest of oil palms, so that us western people can gobble up large amounts of Nutella?

[edy]

Speaking of oil palms... I think I found a good source for what is going on here from the man himself, David Hertz who won the XPrize:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvvVWZQnhes&feature=youtu.be&t=449

Screenshot from that part of video here:



If the video doesn't open up to the right spot, jump to 7:30 time mark. David is seen talking about sustainable island power system using coconuts running a biomass power plant. Just add a dehumidifier and bingo!

Note that in his bio it says he did work on some buildings having to do with an auto museum which was for 1920's and 1930's cars which possibly could have introduced him to the idea of wood chip boilers and power plants. So by the looks of it, we are getting closer to what this XPrize was awarded for. Innovation? A good idea? A solution to the world's problems? The best way to get people water in areas that need it most? Practical? Environmentally friendly? You be the judge.... maybe it was the best out of the worst ideas, and the prize had to go to someone.

[EEVblog]

[edy]

Thanks for linking that video! I didn't see it before creating this post.... So I'm glad to see I wasn't losing my mind when I saw this story and had the same doubts and suspicions. I'm a bit disheartened to see XPrize joining the ranks of all the other shyster organizations out there who piss away good money at fancy parties to award this kind of stuff. Then again, the US Government also gave a huge grant to the guys who developed solar roadways so I guess I shouldn't be surprised in this day and age.

Remember the objective of the competition though... it seems the winning team did achieve it.... Extract 2000 L of drinkable water per day at a cost of 2 cents/Liter using "renewable" energy source. They technically were able to meet that goal using a large enough dehumidifier AND using biomass (which they can claim is renewable but terrible producer of CO2) as their energy source AND if actually a source of water in the combustion products. I don't believe SOLAR alone would do it, or if the biomass was not part of the source of water (that is, if it was only the power plant and the air had to provide all the water).

Based on the criteria of that Xprize competition, they found a loophole that may meet the requirements to the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law. This whole idea of providing biomass to fuel their machine and provide the abundant source of water vapour seems like it is cheating the system, and probably not the original intent of what idea Xprize had in mind. Because poor people in deserts with no supply of water somehow have wood chips, coconuts, grasses and other hydrocarbon-rich detritus sitting around. Technically I could have won the prize by building a truck powered by biomass to drive to a water source, fill it up with water and bring it back to where I need it.

[donotdespisethesnake]

Where does the CO2 go?
I thought it was a bad idea to release too much in the air?

Very poor trolling attempt. Only morons think trees grow using fossil fuels. 

[tom66]

Burning biomass which produces CO2 is net carbon neutral,  because the plants absorbed that carbon less than one hundred years ago.

The problem with carbon emissions is burning million-year-old extracted hydrocarbons, that were built up over the course of many millions of years,  in a matter of a century.

[amyk]

So you must figure out a way to take the heat directly and convert it to electrical energy (to drive your dehumidifier).

No electricity needed, you can use the heat directly to power a refrigeration cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator

[Marco]

Even with the slight increase in dehumidifier efficiency if you also get water from passively cooled down combustion products, I just don't see how it could possibly compete with RO if there is polluted/salt water near by. Same for anywhere you can drill a well, with a shipping container worth of equipment you can drill a 100 feet well in a day, through some rock if necessary.

So this would only be useful in a desert or at high elevations ... it's kind of a niche piece of equipment.

[edy]

So you must figure out a way to take the heat directly and convert it to electrical energy (to drive your dehumidifier).

No electricity needed, you can use the heat directly to power a refrigeration cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator

That's neat! I wonder if these guys use this method of cooling.

[Added later:]

Does Xprize actually publish the winning design? Do we have any technical data? I assume they have to prove their prototype does the job? I see the other teams took the "renewable" to mean solar and wind, they equated it with green, so their solutions would have difficulty meeting liters produced per day and inconsistency of humidity, and have to be massive in scale. Burning hydrocarbons chemically creates way more water and provides the energy. If I had a reverse osmosis machine next to ocean powered by wind/solar it could also work... That would be cheating... Yet these guys cheat by assuming a supply of biomass is readily available to combust also.

[Added even later:]

Scenario 1: Using either solar/wind or a biomass powerplant but only AIR as water source...

- calculate the amount of energy in kWh needed by a standard dehumidifier to produce 2000 L per day from say a reasonable level of humidity in the air
- figure out the scale needed (how many solar panels/wind/powerplant) to generate the energy needed for this size system


Scenario 2: Using biomass as energy source AND as water source (from combustion byproduct)

- calculate the amount of water produced by burning a certain amount of biomass into combustion exhaust byproducts
- figure out what level of humidity and temperature those combustion products will be entering the dehumidifier after filtering
- figure out how much power is needed to condense the exhaust vapours down into water (to determine how much biomass needs to be burned)

In scenario 2, we will get an idea of how much biomass is needed to feed the machine per 24 hours. It will be independent of outside humidity. Assuming the energy captured by burning biomass can power the dehumidifier to the level required to condense 2000 L (given the conditions of humidity/temperature of exhaust it is supplied), we can see if the biomass alone will supply all the needed water vapour. If not, then we will have to burn more biomass to get the necessary water.