Making Water Out of Thin Air
When one of the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it is rapidly becoming less accessible, a solution is not only necessary, it is mandatory.
Over 70% of the human body is made up one one thing, water. And though around 75% of our planet is covered in water, there are still individuals today that lack the ability to access clean, fresh water. It can sometimes be a struggle for us in first world countries to grasp this reality, however this is a problem that even in the wonderful United States of America, can creep up. Areas like flint Michigan, or Ridgecrest Louisiana have faulty instructor, contaminating their water, rendering it undrinkable. However the problem does not stop there, in certain disaster areas where nature lays waste to cities, families may find themselves stranded without drinkable water for extended periods of time.
So it is clear, no matter where you live, either under the sunny skies of the US, or in the Sahara desert, the need for water is very real. So how can we solve this problem? It's not like we can just make water out of thing air? Or can we? A project hosted by XPRIZE has stretched this question to its very core, and said the answer is conclusively FALSE! That's right, a team tackling the project has actually developed a way to extract water out of thin air, using entirely renewable energy. This, paired with it's low cost of production, makes it the perfect tool for natural disaster areas for relief efforts, or to integrate into infrastructure around our country as cities original infrastructure becomes dated and out falls behind, taking us one step closer to relying entirely on renewable resources.
This project was inspired by the realization of just how many people worldwide are affected by insufficient water sources. Statistically, over 2 billion people, are drinking from sources contaminated by fecal mater, leading to an estimated 502,000 deaths annually. This tragic reality is a global nightmare, and something that had to be addressed. And so, the goal was set, develop a way to extract at minimum, 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere using only renewable energy, and for the cost to exceed no more than two cents per liter. Once the XPRIZE was set, teams from around the worlds registered for the competition, 92 different reams from 27 different countries in total joined the competition to win a $1.5 million dollar grand prize developing a way to pull water out of thin air.
The winner of this group was a California based team, previously disqualified, however following another teams drop from the competition, the California based team by the name of the Skywater Alliance, raced back into the competition, and eventually into the lead. They gave everything they had to give to their development, even going as far as mortgaging their home in order to finance their project. They were eventually a smashing success, developing a biomass gasification system, which "captured the waste heat and the moisture contained in plant matter to create an augmented environment which made an ideal microclimate for maximum water production," as stated in the XPRIZE article written after the conclusion of this challenge.
Skywater Alliance was able to do what is probably still considered impossible in the minds of many, and their efforts were thoroughly applauded. 2018 they were awarded a check for the sum of $1,5000,000 dollars, for their word on this project.
https://www.xprize.org/prizes/water-abundance/articles/the-path-to-a-water-abundance-xprize-winner
I added your content to the Project page. https://wikieducator.org/User:Vtaylor/Computers_and_Society/CIS2_Grand_Challenges#John_Thurman
Why didn't you do this yourself?
..vt
I though I did. Apparently I did it wrong. I was playing around with it and thought I had done it correctly, but obviously I didn't. Sorry about that. :(
