Post by wheelspinner on Nov 10, 2011 5:48:39 GMT -5
Truly a great idea. I really hope this one takes off.
Water from thin air: Aussie Ed's Airdrop an international hit
Asher Moses
November 10, 2011 - 1:12PM
An Australian designer has beaten 500 inventors to win a £10,000 international prize for his beetle-inspired device that is capable of extracting water from even the driest desert air.
With global temperatures continuing to rise and droughts set to become more severe, a device capable of literally pulling water out of thin air is likely to have significant global applications.
Edward Linacre's win for his Airdrop invention is the second year in a row an Australian has won the global James Dyson Award. Last year, the winner was Sydney designer Sam Adeloju, who came up with a life-saving bazooka capable of shooting an emergency flotation device 150 metres out to sea.
Edward Linacre says his Airdrop device can harvest 11.5 millilitres of water for every cubic metre of air. Photo: Arsineh Houspian
"I'm just blown away mate - it's still sinking in," Linacre, 27, told Fairfax Media in a phone interview.
Linacre, a graduate of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, wanted to solve the drought problem afflicting farmers in parts of Australia. A lack of rain resulted in dry, damaged soil, dead crops and mounting debt - and at the height of the crisis last year one farmer was taking their life each week.
His solution, Airdrop, can harvest 11.5 millilitres of water for every cubic meter of air in the driest deserts such as the Negev in Israel, which has an average relative air humidity of 64 per cent. A small scale prototype Linacre installed at his parents' house created about a litre of water a day, but further iterations of the design are expected to increase the yield.
Rather than using complex, energy-intensive methods such as desalination or tapping into sacred underground water sources, Airdrop's source of water is abundant - the air - and so it can be used anywhere in the world.
It delivers the water to the roots of crops in dry areas by pushing air through a network of underground pipes, cooling it down to the point where water condenses. The water is then pumped to the roots of plants, which Linacre said was the most efficient irrigation method.
"I made several prototypes, some of them still sitting in my mum's backyard, but now with the £10,000 from the James Dyson award I'm going to be able to look at a large scale, agricultural scale prototype," he said.
Linacre was inspired by the Namib beetle, which survives in landscapes that get just half an inch of rain per year by consuming the dew it collects on the hydrophilic skin of its back. Similarly, the desert rhubarb can harvest 16 times the amount of water than other plants in its region by using deep water chanelling cavities in its leaves.
"Biomimicry is a powerful weapon in an engineer's armoury," said James Dyson, whose charity sponsors the award.
"We chose Edward's project because it was a very good and original solution to what has become a real problem."
Linacre said he was seeing a patent attorney this week to protect his invention and would then embark on the long road to commercialisation. He would love his system to be rolled out to farmers within "a couple of years" but it was going to take "a long time and a lot of development" to get it properly off the ground.
"When I start looking at the serious development of this thing, every part down to how rugged the system above ground needs to be, the protection of the solar panel, the filtering of the air from dust particles - there's just so much to do and it's quite daunting but it's a passion of mine and I want to take it to the next level," he said.
Linacre said he was keen for his invention to be an Autralian product and after building a full working large-scale prototype he would seek support from local investors.
"The most important thing for me is it's helping something ... it's not the profit," he said.
He said the device was a low-tech solution that could be installed and maintained by the farmers themselves. It powers itself using solar panels.
In addition to Linacre's cash prize, a further £10,000 has been awarded to Swinburne university. Linacre said without the university's help he would never have got his idea off the ground.
The James Dyson Award is run by the James Dyson Foundation and each year students of product design, industrial design or design engineering from around the world are invited to enter.
This year's runners up include Kwick Screen (Britain), a retractable room divider to help healthcare professionals make the best use of available space, and Blindspot (Singapore), which helps visually handicapped people get around by using social media, Bluetooth and other technologies to pick up information about the user's surroundings and transmit directions via an earpiece connected to their cane. The cane also has a horizontally rolling ball on its handle to point users in the direction they should walk.
Read more: www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/water-from-thin-air-aussie-eds-airdrop-an-international-hit-20111110-1n8ks.html#ixzz1dIXekTcF
Water from thin air: Aussie Ed's Airdrop an international hit
Asher Moses
November 10, 2011 - 1:12PM
An Australian designer has beaten 500 inventors to win a £10,000 international prize for his beetle-inspired device that is capable of extracting water from even the driest desert air.
With global temperatures continuing to rise and droughts set to become more severe, a device capable of literally pulling water out of thin air is likely to have significant global applications.
Edward Linacre's win for his Airdrop invention is the second year in a row an Australian has won the global James Dyson Award. Last year, the winner was Sydney designer Sam Adeloju, who came up with a life-saving bazooka capable of shooting an emergency flotation device 150 metres out to sea.
Edward Linacre says his Airdrop device can harvest 11.5 millilitres of water for every cubic metre of air. Photo: Arsineh Houspian
"I'm just blown away mate - it's still sinking in," Linacre, 27, told Fairfax Media in a phone interview.
Linacre, a graduate of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, wanted to solve the drought problem afflicting farmers in parts of Australia. A lack of rain resulted in dry, damaged soil, dead crops and mounting debt - and at the height of the crisis last year one farmer was taking their life each week.
His solution, Airdrop, can harvest 11.5 millilitres of water for every cubic meter of air in the driest deserts such as the Negev in Israel, which has an average relative air humidity of 64 per cent. A small scale prototype Linacre installed at his parents' house created about a litre of water a day, but further iterations of the design are expected to increase the yield.
Rather than using complex, energy-intensive methods such as desalination or tapping into sacred underground water sources, Airdrop's source of water is abundant - the air - and so it can be used anywhere in the world.
It delivers the water to the roots of crops in dry areas by pushing air through a network of underground pipes, cooling it down to the point where water condenses. The water is then pumped to the roots of plants, which Linacre said was the most efficient irrigation method.
"I made several prototypes, some of them still sitting in my mum's backyard, but now with the £10,000 from the James Dyson award I'm going to be able to look at a large scale, agricultural scale prototype," he said.
Linacre was inspired by the Namib beetle, which survives in landscapes that get just half an inch of rain per year by consuming the dew it collects on the hydrophilic skin of its back. Similarly, the desert rhubarb can harvest 16 times the amount of water than other plants in its region by using deep water chanelling cavities in its leaves.
"Biomimicry is a powerful weapon in an engineer's armoury," said James Dyson, whose charity sponsors the award.
"We chose Edward's project because it was a very good and original solution to what has become a real problem."
Linacre said he was seeing a patent attorney this week to protect his invention and would then embark on the long road to commercialisation. He would love his system to be rolled out to farmers within "a couple of years" but it was going to take "a long time and a lot of development" to get it properly off the ground.
"When I start looking at the serious development of this thing, every part down to how rugged the system above ground needs to be, the protection of the solar panel, the filtering of the air from dust particles - there's just so much to do and it's quite daunting but it's a passion of mine and I want to take it to the next level," he said.
Linacre said he was keen for his invention to be an Autralian product and after building a full working large-scale prototype he would seek support from local investors.
"The most important thing for me is it's helping something ... it's not the profit," he said.
He said the device was a low-tech solution that could be installed and maintained by the farmers themselves. It powers itself using solar panels.
In addition to Linacre's cash prize, a further £10,000 has been awarded to Swinburne university. Linacre said without the university's help he would never have got his idea off the ground.
The James Dyson Award is run by the James Dyson Foundation and each year students of product design, industrial design or design engineering from around the world are invited to enter.
This year's runners up include Kwick Screen (Britain), a retractable room divider to help healthcare professionals make the best use of available space, and Blindspot (Singapore), which helps visually handicapped people get around by using social media, Bluetooth and other technologies to pick up information about the user's surroundings and transmit directions via an earpiece connected to their cane. The cane also has a horizontally rolling ball on its handle to point users in the direction they should walk.
Read more: www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/water-from-thin-air-aussie-eds-airdrop-an-international-hit-20111110-1n8ks.html#ixzz1dIXekTcF
