Overcoming Distance is Humanity's Fundamental Freshwater Challenge

Transportation of water to where people have chosen to live or forcing people to live in close proximity to freshwater supplies are two solutions that mankind has practiced ever since the beginning of civilization. This "transportation" issue is still the heart of our current and future freshwater crises.


Places with Meager Freshwater Supplies
The story and images of women spending their day carting water from sources far, far away from where they live, are well known and publicized as a scourge on the already poor. 

Source - newstimeafrica.com

Source - workworthdoing.com

Innovators have developed devices, like the rolling container that makes water transportation a less physical activity, but does not address the basic issue - the water is far away from where the people who need it are.

Ancient Roman Aqueduct
Source - think2020.tripod.com

In the richer parts of the world the solution to this basic issue is no different, except in scale and institutionalization - the formation of an organization which exists for the sole purpose of supplying needed freshwater.

Source - planetforward.org

Source - spannertech.com

Without such costly and massive creations, most of the population centers in the developed world would also be susceptible to water shortages and supply disruptions.
Covering the distance problem is still the most basic issue behind the supply of freshwater.
Places with Abundant Freshwater Supply
Humanity's Freshwater crisis would disappear in an instant if people lived in locations where there currently exists an abundant natural supply of freshwater and where future freshwater supplies were assured.

Source - worldatlas.com

Unfortunately, however, the two locations with the most freshwater resources (the areas around the North and South Poles) are too inhospitable for long human existence.


And there are no other locations that have necessary freshwater supplies for the existing and future mega-cities that are projected to house nearly 50% of the world's population.


The Distance Eliminating Solutions
The only "local" bodies of freshwater, that can eliminate or, at least, drastically shorten the distance, are the bodies of water located in the "local" air (the atmosphere) and under the ground over which people live. The reality that local underground supplies are already non-existent or under severe stress of becoming extinct, leaves only the option of finding ways to harvest water from the local atmosphere.

Harvesting Liquid Water in Fog - Part II

Mankind has made significant strides towards harvesting from the 2% of water in the air that exists in liquid form. This progress comes from artificially replicating nature's inventions like the back of the African Stenocara beetle. Other moisture capturing systems are found in nature's designs for the Texas Thorny Devil Lizard, the structure of Cactus thorns and the structure of the leaves of plants like the Welwitschia Mirabilis.

Bio-mimicry & Species Adaptation

Stenocara Beetle
(Image: www.rain-barrel.net)

The Stenocara beetle lives in the Namib Desert in Africa which has endured arid and semi-arid condition for over 55 million years, has less than 5mm of rain annually and is practically barren of vegetation. 

The only other sources of water are underground rivers and morning fog that moves in over the desert near the coast from the ocean. This fog travels at gale speeds a few times a month.

Microscopic Detail
(photo: Oxford University)

An inhabitant of the Namib Desert, the Stenocara Beetle has evolved to harvest the liquid water in the fog through a combination of hydrophilic bumps/ridges and hydrophobic troughs/valleys on its back. 

To survive in the desert, Stenocara evolution has adapted it to catch the liquid water in the fog through a back of unique design . As described in http://www.biomimicryeuropa.org, "The peak of each bump is smooth and attracts water. Tiny rounded nodules, no wider than a human hair, cover the slopes of each bump and the troughs in between. The nodules are coated in a wax-like material, making them hydrophobic. When the fog rolls in, the beetle tilts its body into the wind. The water droplets from the fog are repelled from the nodules but stick to the peaks of the bumps. The droplets grow until they are large enough to roll down from the top of the peaks and are channeled to a spot on the beetle's back that leads straight to its mouth."

Design patent No. PCT/GB02/00067

Zoologists, led by Andrew Parker at Oxford University, discovered this hydrophilic-hydrophobic design and have obtained a design patent on it. Now the pace has quickened to find a commercial way to gain from nature's design of the Stenocara beetle's back.

The MIT Project

Chemical engineer Robert E. Cohen and materials scientist Michael F. Rubner have perfected a film with hydrophilic peaks and hydrophobic runways that extract liquid water from air and possibly go a step further in coalescing water vapor into liquid water. The next frontier is commercialization of this film for common use.

The University of Sydney Project

Australia, a country with few inland water resources, has nearly 90% of its population living in coastal cities. At the University of Sydney, a small team has a large goal - develop a film that can be laid on a large surface (like the side of a building or the roof of a house) that is similar in design to nature's design for the Stenocara's back with the very same water-harvesting functionality that nature has adapted for the survival of Stenocara and the propagation of its species

All this effort for 2% of the water contained in the air! 

Can Living Things Make Water?

Making water by combining its components, oxygen and hydrogen, requires a process we know very well from Chemistry textbooks, However, we do not know how to control this process in a way to safely manage the large amount of energy that the process releases. (see post dated November 9, 2010).Aerobic RespirationAll living things (Animals, humans, fungi, algae, bacteria and plants) breathe i.e. take in oxygen from the environment. Their body's biological process breaks down glucose in tissues to release energy.

This process can be over-simplistically described by the following equation:

  Glucose + Oxygen = Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy

and chemically represented as follows:

   C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂     →     6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O  +  Energy

As shown in the above equation, this process creates water as a by-product while releasing energy in the form of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate)

ATP is the main energy source for cell functions. About 30 molecules of ATP are produced from oxidation of 1 molecule of glucose. Some of the water released hydrolyzes ATP to ADP but the rest remains as water in a cell.

If we could synthetically perform the above, we will be creating water using a biological process that Nature perfected a long long time ago.Of course, the biological process of aerobic Respiration is not as simple as shown above and is better represented as follows:

This is the challenge faced by the emerging science of Synthetic Biology when the task is to replicate, scale up and commercially extract water from the atmosphere.

Image Sources: Solarnavigator.net; library.thinkquest.org, Wikipedia

Harvesting Dew using Biomimicry!

The Groasis Waterboxx (www.groasis.com) has won Popular Science’s Best of What’s New Innovation of the Year Award (http://www.popsci.com/bown/2010/product/aquapro-holland-groasis-waterboxx) by harnessing some nifty nature-inspired (biologically-inspired) engineering.

Quoting Groasis’ website, “The Groasis waterboxx is an 'intelligent water incubator' that produces and captures water from the air through condensation and rain. The condensation is caused by artificial stimulation and the water is captured because of the design of the device, without using energy.” For a very instructive and entertaining animation visit www.groasis.com.

The design of the Groasis Waterboxx is a recent successful innovation based on the emerging science of biomimicry (the word is a combination of “bios”, meaning life, and “mimesis”, meaning ‘to imitate”) that looks at nature’s creations for mankind’s inspiration for building sustainable ecologically supportive solutions.

The most famous innovation using Biomimicry principles is, of course, Velcro. As described in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro ) - This hook-and-loop fastener was invented in 1941 by a Swiss engineer, George de Mestral who lived in Commugny, Switzerland. The idea came to him one day after returning from a hunting trip with his dog in the Alps. He took a close look at the burrs (seeds) of burdock that kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur. He examined them under a microscope, and noted their hundreds of "hooks" that caught on anything with a loop, such as clothing, animal fur, or hair. He saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion, if he could figure out how to duplicate the hooks and loops. Other examples at http://brainz.org/15-coolest-cases-biomimicry/