Augh! Why, why, why do so many of these articles do this? Don’t mix units like that!
3.4 gallons = 12.886 kg (At 1 liter per kg)
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The problem isn’t adding heat, it’s taking it away from the gel that’s absorbing the water vapor and turning it into liquid. That’s 2257 kJ/kg for the phase change, or 29,341 kJ for the 13L.
Possibly it could be dumped into radiator fins and let the desert air take it away, but it has to be gotten rid of before the gel heats up to 140F.
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i wouldn’t put too much stock in what the gamergater thunderf00t says. if he’s right on this – and he might well be – it’ll be by coincidence, and not reasoned logic.
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Fair enough. Didn’t know about the Gamergate thing, but I can see it. I followed him for a while out of amusement, stopped when he started saying things I found offensive. Same with Dave Jone’s channel.
I used the reference because I remembered his analysis of this from years ago, solar roads, and the absolute idiocy of Vegas / Musk’s Boring company.
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If you were in a desert environment where the ambient temperature was in the mid-70s but you had enough sunlight to make a solar oven that could heat to 140 degrees then it seems like you could still let the environment do most of the work for you.
Even if you couldn’t get something like this efficient enough to work on solar power alone it could still be a practical device for certain situations where shipping in water is difficult. For example, an outpost or research station in a remote area that has no surface water.
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Ground source cooling should work even in the desert, pump power could be solar?
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makes sense.
yeah, unfortunately he made a ton of videos – paid for via patreon – attacking women journalists for covering video games. he even managed to get himself fired from his day job over it. he’s never renounced or apologized for his misogyny, and it’s really difficult to trust somebody’s science takes when they can’t acknowledge that women are full fledged human beings deserving of respect.
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Ground source cooling doesn’t really work in the long term. That was the problem with schemes like Waterseeker that depended on cooling vast volumes of air to below the dew point to condense the water. (Not just paying the phase change bill.): Dry dirt doesn’t conduct heat well, and it isn’t long before they saturate their heat sink.
Hm. The volume of air containing 13L of water is probably another set of numbers to check. They’d have to run at least that much air past the gel, probably much more because it’s not going to grab every passing water molecule. Does it need an intake blower?
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Mos Eisley is Bakersfield
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Mos Eisley had less political corruption.
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Yep… and apparently, Herbert also drew quite heavily from the non-fiction book The Sabres of Paradise (1960), by Lesley Blanch. The numerous point-by-point similarities between Dune and SoP is, taken as a whole, extraordinary.
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Another negative: in the article and pictures, this is described as a “film”… just how much surface area is required to have 1kg of the material to produce 13L/day?
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Is that what Telly Savalas used to hold his toupe on?
On another note: rather than think how much potable water this stuff can create, think in terms of its use in anti-desertification. If it can assist in getting plants established it may have a longer term effect in altering local climate.
Here is further food for thought:
and
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…and he stole the Ancient Egyptians’ wind scoops and made a few changes. The wind scoops were on the tops of buildings, funnelling the captured breezes down inside and cooling the place. They could be tightly closed when sandstorms approached.
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Is “stole” the right word here? If the technology of Ancient Egyptian wind scoops worked for their desert-dwelling society, then why couldn’t desert-dwellers in a fictional story be made to use the same tech?
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Things like that are great, but they depend on the local conditions being just right. You could have your Skywell, loads of humidity in the air, but if the temperature doesn’t get down to the dew point, you’ve got nothing.
There’s room for clever tricks. You can make ice (and ice cream!) in the desert at night by shielding an area from breezes, letting the heat radiant into the cloudless sky, then covering up during the daytime. Repeat.
Or turn an underground area into a cold sink by only letting in the cooler night air. (Many caves do this naturally because hot summer air can’t sink into the cave, but in winter, when the outside air is colder, the air exchanges. Those icy caves are the work of decades of cold winters.)
Okay, he adapted the Egyptians’ technology for use in his stories. 
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Thin air? Moist air, more like.
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Some authors are penny wise, franc foolish.
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