The Namib Desert beetle stenocara gracilipes Photo: A nbd nano self-refilling water bottle start up company, inspired by a desert beetle, is using nano technology to develop a self-filling water bottle. Well, the lessons of nature have paid off in some remarkable products already — think airplanes, or Velcro, for example. And a unique water harvesting beetle inspired one of Professor Frankic's former students, Deckard Sorensen, to start a business.
This beetle, the Namib desert beetle, lives in an area of the world that only gets half an inch of rainfall per year. However, every morning this beetle climbs to the top of a sand dune, sticks its back to the wind, and drinks 12 percent of its weight in water. It has super-hydrophobic and super-hydrophilic regions of water on its back.
And micro droplets condense on these super hydrophilic regions, or water-loving regions, these micro droplets outgrow the ridge, and hit the water-hating region and aggregate all of the other droplets downwards. So, what did you take about what you learned from the Namib beetle and turn it into a business? We realized that if we can use air as a primary source of water, and realize that there are 3.
Basically we apply this in a surface coating and use a fan to pass the air from the environment through, expose this nbd nano self-refilling water bottle and clean this air, and pass it over our surface coatings, and the moisture that is in the air is extracted. To create a re-usable water bottle that fills itself. And we see this being applicable to anything from marathon runners to people in third world countries, because we realize that water is such a large issue in the world today, and we want to try to alleviate those problems with a cost efficient solution.
Now, what about plants that would need more water than is available, how might this system work for them? So, how much energy is required to keep this system going?
You say you have to blow the air over your special nanomaterial. Dunes of the Namib Desert, Sossufley, Namibia. We actually see the maritime environment as really a very large market for nbd nano self-refilling water bottle because humidity is actually constantly regenerated over a large body of water and then we can pull that humidity from the air to support people who possibly take long trips on yachts, or provide a sort of potable water source that can be run off a solar panel while at sea.
The metric of our surface coating is about three liters nbd nano self-refilling water bottle square meter per hour, and that is based off 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 75 percent relative humidity. When can I get a self-filling water bottle? We are raising our seed round of financing right now, and we expect to be in the market sometime mid Thank you so much, Deckard! Donate to Living on Earth! Living on Earth is an independent media program and relies entirely on contributions from listeners and institutions supporting public service.
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