from Hacker News

Vapor-collection technology saves water while clearing the air

by x14km2d on 9/4/21, 11:14 PM with 24 comments

• by 01100011 on 9/5/21, 2:51 AM

  > ...vapor collection could be made much more efficient by first zapping the tiny droplets of water with a beam of electrically charged particles, or ions, to give each droplet a slight electric charge. Then, the stream of droplets passes through a wire mesh, like a window screen, that has an opposite electrical charge. This causes the droplets to be strongly attracted to the mesh

  Woah, this seems really simple and possibly applicable to other situations where you're trying to condense a vapor.

• by mPReDiToR on 9/5/21, 8:02 AM

  I guess at some point we're going to have to use a programming language to interface with these things.

  Will it be something like the ones used for binary load lifters?

• by brohoolio on 9/5/21, 2:24 AM

  I wonder if this tech could be applied to evaporative cooling systems for data centers in hot regions to capture the water that is otherwise lost.

  I know many of the big data centers use a ton of water in areas that don’t exactly have water to spare.

• by tdeck on 9/5/21, 7:34 AM

  If you find this interesting, there are other technologies either proposed or used to collect atmospheric water.

  Air wells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_%28condenser%29

  Fog collection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_%28condenser%29

• by zbrozek on 9/5/21, 1:04 AM

  This seems like a roundabout way to achieve a closed-loop cooling cycle. Why do this vs a water-to-air heat exchanger and never evaporate the water in the first place?

• by shmeano on 9/5/21, 7:13 AM

  If this became widespread wouldn’t this negate some of the positive side-effects of creating more light reflection on earth? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190220-how-artificially...

• by Managor on 9/5/21, 1:46 PM

  This is ultimately almost useless because the minerals in the water are more important than the water itself.