Water from the air? With this new cool new invention (Fontus Bottle), that’s not a problem anymore…
If you are going for a long trip on your bike, you already know, how difficult it is to take a sufficient amount of water. It is heavy and the space, that you can use is limited. Also your skills are limited so why to push yourself, when you can have new self filling water bottle, which harvests drinking water from the air? That sound amazing, doesn’t it. With the snap of your fingers, you don’t have to think twice, whether or not you are going for long adventure on your bike.
The person, who is responsible for it, is student Kristof Retezár from Austria’s University of Applied Arts. This device is called the ‘Fontus’ and it works best in humid weather. The whole point of Fontus is to condense the moisture in the air into safe, fresh drinking water. The first experiments have shown, that it can produce 0.5 Liters of water in just something under 1 hour, in at least 20°C (68°F) and approximately 50 percent humidity.
Fontus – Self-Filling Bottle
Kristof said for the James Dyson Award website, that his goal was to create small, compact and self-sufficient device able to absorb humid air, separate water molecules from air molecules and store this water in a bottle. The main idea was inspired by all the places around the globe, where something like this could be used as a tool to improve lives, because of very rare sources of clean water. On this website he also explained, how it works:
“In order to achieve condensation, one must cool hot, humid air down. This device has small cooler installed in its centre called Peltier Element. This cooler is divided into two: when powered by electricity – the upper side cools the hot side down, the colder the upper side will get. Consequently, these two sides are separated from each other. The air enters the bottom chamber at a high speed when moving forward with the bike and cools the hot side down. Moreover, when the air enters the upper chamber it is stopped by little walls perforated non-linear, reducing its speed in order to give the air the needed time to lose its water molecules.”
Fontus – How Does It Work
This is not the first device, that works on this principle. Warka Water towers in the Namib desert mimic beetles beetles that drink the fog from the air. Eole Water in United Arab Emirates uses wind turbines to cool the air and then condensing it into drinking water.
Warka Water Towers
Eole Water Turbine
It is not really that hard to make a concept, with these attributes, it very hard to develop a system, that is practical and cost-efficient. The price for each Fontus bottle will be somewhere around 20 – 35 Euro ($25 – 40). Kristof Retezár is now exploring the idea of crowd-funding this project and make it move forward faster.
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Fontus Water Bottle
Source: http://www.jamesdysonaward.org/projects/fontus-2/
Related article, which we would like to recommend to you: Where Did the Water Come From?
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Sounds like a good invention. Where can I buy them?