Condensation from humid air, using cold sea water

Challenge:
Supplement scarce water by condensing water from air that has high relative humidity.

Proposed solution:
Pump cold seawater through condensation coils which allow condensation from humid air, and collection of water. The air around Cape Town is a good candidate having high relative humidity 70% - 80%(https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Humidity-perc,Cape_Town,South-Africa). The seawater is cold (https://seatemperature.info/cape-point-water-temperature.html) and gets colder at deeper levels - about 10 deg. C per 500 meters (http://www.destinydeepseawater.com/ocean_temp_info.html). Thus water at 5 degrees or less could be pumped up. The condensation units could be floating at sea, or stationary at the coast.

The pump could be wind-driven. “the average speed at Cape Point was 6,9 metres per second and 42%of its wind blew at eight or more metres per second.” https://mg.co.za/article/2003-07-03-which-is-sas-windiest-city

Desired hackathon goal:
In terms of ensuring that innovations do not create more problems than they solve (progress traps), the exercise would be to evaluate firstly what the potential adverse effects of the device/project would be, and if the cons do not outweigh the pros, then proceed with development.

Resources:
Needed: ethical and technical evaluation of the pros and cons.
If it’s a go, technical expertise for researching the effective size of the materials, and required scale of project deployment.

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This could be very good.

I don’t know if someone wise or knowledgeable has assessed the utility of similar possibilities, but I’ve collected a couple of similar technologies here over the last year

https://www.facebook.com/groups/485852545083528/

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I notice in Pauli’s talk he mentions something similar by Charlie Paton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse

i dont know if this project have someting usable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34DiF0s5nFE

Thank you - I should mention that the simple condensation wont produce drinking water first. It will be primarily for washing, sewer, gardens etc. For drinking, some treatment is needed.

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Has anyone started a flow chart?
Including (for example)
Sources of water: Air (rain and condensate), Aquifers, dams, rivers, grey water and “recovered” water (from sewage). Flow rates in and out.
Usage by sector and what water can be used by whom.
Filter methods - sand, charcoal, membrane etc
Sterilisation methods - ozone, heat, halides
Power sources - sea/wave, wind, solar, human, electricity, oil based fuel
etc

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Hi William, I believe these and other points raised will be mapped using the Kumu platform. Resources for doing the event and the flowcharting at the same time are not available. Gien plans to get the flowcharting going once the event is over, he will be able to give you more info.
Thanks
Dan

Hey Daniel (@endprogresstraps), exactly true!

Dan and @MarkusKruger, you guys should talk. Maybe your tech may compliment each other…at least the tidal energy part of Markus’s hack:

Markus is an experienced physicist, educator and consultant I work with and who is part of SRG. Markus is definitely a nonlinear thinker!

Ian (@Ianpat) and his partner and co-facilitator Deidre use Causal Layered Analysis and wicked problem analysis as tools in their facilitation. Deidre is a Masters student at STellenbosch’s Institute for Future’s Research and we are meeting at the Cape Town Science Centre for a debriefing of the hackathon kickoff event.

Ian is now taking all the data gathered and we are going to determine how we map this. @William, What you say makes a lot of sense. I think what we will do is report back to all of you once we have our debriefing. Then we can couple William’s idea into that. I also thought of developing a kind of “Open Water Standard” for buildings that would integrate a lot of the subsystems required for putting together a water smart building.

I think we need two versions:

  1. new builds
  2. retrofits

So once we have all the data, we will then begin the mapping exercise. We will probably include Kumu guru Gene Bellinger in this…as he is a master at both Kumu and Insight Maker software, which can give us a way to quantitatively model.

I invite all of you to help me do the mapping as well. I’m going to start out and develop a skeleton

And if you don’t already know, Daniel (@endprogresstraps) wrote one of the first books on Progress Traps years ago - Escaping the Progress Trap

Visit Dan’s website here:
http://www.progresstrap.org/

Dan and I have an interesting complementary connection! He is originally from Cape Town but has moved to Canada. I’m originally from Canada but have moved to Cape Town!

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