Solving Desert Water Shortages Using 20,000 Volts

what if the solution to water shortages could be found in the form of a morning fog providing drinkable irrigable water imagine if you will you're a farmer trying to grow crop in the Sahara quite the difficult place for agriculture or maybe you're trying to grow crop in the sonor and desert one day your source of water and Oasis begins drying up your only realistic option is to dig a deeper well right not really I mean yeah it is an option but it's not the only one even air deserts have plenty of moisture in the air

I'm talking about Coastal fog these fog events are most common in the early morning and tend to dissipate quickly as the sun rises and heats the air at which point you've lost an opportunity but what if you could capture this morning fog and convert it into irrigation for your crops or hell maybe even drinking water some cultures have been doing this for centuries using water sees or fog Nets but they're wildly inefficient you know uh worst case scenario they convert about 2% of the fog into water and best case scenario only 10 and that's where

high voltage physics might just change the game entirely over the past month I've worked to build and optimize a watering system unlike any other converting The elusive moisture in fog into pure water within [Music] seconds this video is sponsored by grons and stay tuned to the end for a huge announcement if this sounds sci-fi well it almost is except it's not you see I'm not the only one to consider using high voltage to condense water out of fog a recent study by MIT in 2018 explored this very thing and their results were biblical using an

ion emitter they introduced a 10 kolt charge to the incoming fog droplets and directed them towards a grounded collector grid they tested with and without power which clearly indicated the application of high voltage to a fog net can increase water collection by 20 times in fact there's a time-lapse video of the experiment they posted on YouTube it's easy to understand what's Happening Here I'll link the study and the video down below now they used a 5x5 CM grid about the size of this box for their experiment but it doesn't necessarily prove the feasibility of this

on the larger scale for agriculture I want to radically upscale this process test various geometries and see if this Tech could change Aid agriculture going forward in extreme environments like the Sahara or Sonoran Desert Water is incredibly scarce that's why plants animals and even people need to find creative ways to stay hydrated and nourished while I'm building a Contraption to extract water from the air another way to stay on top of your health especially if you're not always getting the perfect diet is with grunes gummies you know I've been really Health oriented most of my

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delicious click the link in the description down below or scan the QR code on screen to get up to 45% off your order of grons today okay back to the science of pulling water out of thin air besides this MIT study there's not much literature available on this topic I mean asking chat GPT if high voltage could be used to collect fog the only thing at referenced the only thing I could find on the entire Internet besides the study was a video of mine from a few months ago yeah I'm kind of in unknown territory

but that's kind of my favorite place to be if I'd be producing water this meant I needed a container to capture it so I got to work building a simple acrylic tray long enough to house a 2ft section of equipment after a bit of boiled Bean water and some thinking I designed a setup that would do the trick two separate pieces one side of MZ fog and electrically charges it and the other side is grounded metal mesh to condense the fog this was an easy print for my prusa and I was off to a hot

[Music] start if you haven't used glute for it's amazing it chemically bonds your pla pieces together helping you to create really massive 3d [Music] [Music] prints right with the system set up let's talk power I designed it to run off 20 to 30,000 volts DC the flyback Transformer I built for a recent video was a perfect candidate but if you'll recall it produces 65 kts AC which is too much so I tuned it down to a familyfriendly 8,000 volts and then ran it through a voltage multiplier giving it approximately 35,000 volts DC negative connection goes

to the metal grid and positive 35,000 volts goes to the emitter side to simulate the morning fog needed for tests an ultrasonic fog maker volunteered as tribute dry ice hell yeah I'm breaking up with you righto I've got the entire setup here the fog production the condensation and the high voltage power now I'm going to run two tests the uh the first test will be run running the fog through the system without power to see just how much of that fog condenses on the mesh uh the mesh grid and then the second test will be

running fog through it but then applying power and the uh any differences between those two tests should be from a single change in variable test one using only fog and no power admittedly this is an unrealistically dense fog regardless I let the system run for 5 minutes and then checked for liquid water from the looks of it absolutely no water condensed on the grids this is still this is still bone dry nothing condensed a bit of a shocker I expected a little bit of condensation but I have no water to measure without power the fog

does not condense but with the addition of power that all changes you'll notice the fog immediately accelerates towards the screen it's amazing going the whole lengthwise all the fog is completely attracted to the grounded mesh yeah it's working that is working within about 20 to 30 seconds the entire metal screen was drenched in water look at that you can see all the water droplets building up this is working so well after about a minute the water formed into droplets which fell increasingly faster and after about 5 minutes minutes a clear puddle was visible it was

really remarkable to see this process took place along the entire length of the screen but was strongest near the ends this is working so much better than I could have hoped woo let's collect the rest of the water all right so I squeegeed all the water to one side of the box and power was on for about 5 minutes so that gives us a Time component now to measure how much water was produced 40 milliliters in 5 minutes 40 mlit with just the first prototype I'm like this is a lot more than I anticipated and

I have some ideas on how to improve the process luckily this entire high voltage electrode with all the plastic and metal in it can be simplified into just a wire a bare thin wire charged to a high enough voltage will easily ionize the surrounding air do you do you see the wire probably not and a thin wire can be stretched over a length of crop weighing virtually nothing that's attractive Additionally the power source can be scaled down significantly currently it's Overkill the general idea was that I'd design the entire system in on shape and create

two Garden Stakes one stake contains the high voltage power source and the other is simply an anchor I bounced back and forth deciding on the geometry and layout and after a few shapes I settled on these babies the one on the right is the powered stake the left the anchor I'll leave a link down below to try out on shape for free next the building began [Music] that'll [Music] do after a few more days and some iterations I didn't show on camera cuz there were a lot changes this is the final result you've got the

multiplier up top driving circuitry down below rechargeable battery right here with electrical ground here and positive 20,000 volts out the top it really took a lot of work to get this all in the package that you see here which is essentially a stake that I stab into the ground as I mentioned there's two stakes that are inserted into the ground a powered one and an unpowered one these get connected by a rod and some wire time to test if this is a really good idea a crazy idea or maybe I'm just crazy if I'm going

to try and duplicate a desert situation I need a box that can hold the sand the apparatus the fog the whole deal and this isn't going to cut it but this guy I think that'll do the trick after a quick trip to Desert Depot I found myself staring at an assortment of spiky little cucumbers also known as Satan's house plants these are designed for Aid deserts so I grabbed two of them and 100 lb of rough sand [Music] a [Music] here's the setup in its entirety quick to assemble and rigid a double length of wire

is stretched across the top and the mesh is grounded we've got the desert we've got the fog condenser now we're just missing the fog and the power once the desert was all fogged up I powered up the system and was really blown away oh that's remarkable just immediate OT the fog immediately clears out yeah I can see water condensing all down the length of the condenser you've got your water droplets right [Music] here it works and it works well um in terms of actual Water Production I don't know the numbers at this time but there's

a very clear line of wet sand underneath of it the entire length of the way underneath the condenser it's pretty much soaked all right here's a better view you can basically see the whole line of irrigation it's it's really something I mean it it works takes about 30 seconds to set up and then within minutes you have enough water to drench A Line in the Sand and last I checked crops are grown in lines now as for the science behind this all it's brilliantly simple the wire is positively charged to 20 KS DC by the

circuit I built when water droplets within the fog come into contact with the wire it steals electrons from the water droplets making them positively charged since the grounded metal grid is only centimeters away the positive water droplets are attracted to the metal grid and fly towards it more and more droplets stick to the grid creating an accumulation of pure water now all logical science aside it wasn't a really huge shocker for me that this condenser would work and let me tell you why so when I was first designing and testing my BSI Mark I ionic

Thruster I kept having issues that I didn't fully understand as it sucked in increasing amounts of fog water would start to accumulate on the grounded metal rods to the point that it would drip and short out the Thruster you can see some of the water droplets right here it honestly was annoying as all hell and it contributed to a whole redesign of the Thruster but it did teach me that fog will condense if it's attracted to a grounded metal object thus the fog condenser an energy efficient way to harvest water and let's talk energy the

condenser is powered by an 850 mamp 12volt battery and pulls 39 wats of power continuously after I ran the system again and collected water It produced 45 mL of water in 5 minutes yeah that means it creates just under 14 ml per wat hour of energy or in simpler terms a 2T section of this setup produces 540 Millers of water per hour using only 39 Watts knowing that I was curious how do these Stakes compare to a commercial dehumidifier um this one was cheap but 4.5 Stars so clearly it works by stupid chance it also

runs off 12 volts and consumes 40 wats of power just like the stakes when turned on and given the same density of fog than ran for 5 minutes It produced a staggering 5 mL of water wow that's only 60 ml per hour at a rate of only 1.5 ml per watt hour the stakes are eight times more efficient at producing water than a commercial dehumidifier and they use low enough power they could be powered by solar but best of all this is entirely scalable with MIT study testing the science and my larger scale experiments testing

the scalability I really think this Tech could be expanded further to be used for Aid Desert agriculture in coastal regions of even the driest deserts morning fog can be really dense it represents a temporary water source that's gone as soon as the sun comes up but hopefully soon that won't be the case I want to refine this further into a larger system and then tested out in the atakama desert in Chile I think I said that right atakama desert anyways it experiences really thick Coastal fog which will be perfect for testing this on the larger

scale let me know your thoughts about all of this in the comments down below thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time