Water Vapor, Climate Change, 3+ Atom Molecules

Solving the world’s water crisis by extracting water from the air around us could also notably alleviate current trends in Climate Change, as water vapor is responsible for the predominant impact on global warming.

Water vapor is the most significant greenhouse gas

Different gasses in the atmosphere have different abilities to absorb, radiate and transmit heat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas):

Gas	Formula	Contribution (%)
Water Vapor	H2O	36 – 72 %
Carbon Dioxide	CO2	9 – 26 %
Methane	CH4	4 – 9 %
Ozone	O3	3 – 7 %

Water vapor’s contribution varies due to environmental and atmospheric conditions:

-          Under a clear sky, this contribution ranges between 36% and 66%

-          Under a cloudy sky, this contribution ranges between 66% and 85%

Don’t create 3+ Atom molecules!

Nitrogen and oxygen, two gases that account for 80% of the atmosphere are not greenhouse gases because each molecule of nitrogen and oxygen in made up of two atoms. Water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone have 3 or more atoms and this makes them excellent absorbers of heat energy radiated by the Earth. Thus, any approach to extract water vapor from air that produces molecules with 3 (or more) atoms will not alleviate current trends in climate change and could further worsen them

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/

US Precipitation - A potential new source of drinking water?

"...... the United States withdraws 339 Billion gallons of ground and surface water a day. Although 4 TRILLION gallons of water falls on us daily in the form of precipitation, much of that disappears in evaporation and runoff ......" (National Geographic Special Edition - Water: The Chaos of Supply).

Can we make water?

We know that a water molecule is made up of one Oxygen atom and two Hydrogen atoms and that hydrogen fires (hydrogen combustion) produce water and heat. What we don’t know is how to control hydrogen combustion. If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, we could learn how to control Hydrogen fires when the necessity for fresh water becomes highly acute.

The water molecule
Water is both a chemical compound and a charged dipolar molecule. One oxygen atom (the red one in the illustration) and two hydrogen atoms (the white ones) link together to form a water molecule”

To create water, both Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules must be present. Combining them is, however, a major hurdle as the mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen is highly explosive because hydrogen is flammable, oxygen promotes combustion and the reaction to produce water releases large amounts of energy.
2H2 + O2 = 2H2O + ENERGY 572 KJ

The Hindenburg disaster
Water is the main by-product of any hydrogen fire. The Hindenburg, which carried over seven million cubic feet of hydrogen could, theoretically speaking, have created as much as half a million liters of water. While there is no practical way to confirm that the Hydrogen fire did indeed produce this much water, there are unconfirmed reports from people present on the ground of a ‘light rain’. It has also not been conclusively proven that the ‘light rain’ was not water vapor (present in the air) condensation.