coolmelbourne.org

Author: Asher Moses
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 10 November, 2011

An Australian designer has beaten 500 inventors to win a £10,000 international prize for his beetle-inspired device that is capable of extracting water from even the driest desert air.

With global temperatures continuing to rise and droughts set to become more severe, a device capable of literally pulling water out of thin air is likely to have significant global applications.

Edward Linacre's win for his Airdrop invention is the second year in a row an Australian has won the global James Dyson Award. Last year, the winner was Sydney designer Sam Adeloju, who came up with a life-saving bazooka capable of shooting an emergency flotation device 150 metres out to sea.

"I'm just blown away mate - it's still sinking in," Linacre, 27, told Fairfax Media in a phone interview.

Linacre, a graduate of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, wanted to solve the drought problem afflicting farmers in parts of Australia. A lack of rain resulted in dry, damaged soil, dead crops and mounting debt - and at the height of the crisis last year one farmer was taking their life each week.

His solution, Airdrop, can harvest 11.5 millilitres of water for every cubic meter of air in the driest deserts such as the Negev in Israel, which has an average relative air humidity of 64 per cent. A small scale prototype Linacre installed at his parents' house created about a litre of water a day, but further iterations of the design are expected to increase the yield.

Rather than using complex, energy-intensive methods such as desalination or tapping into sacred underground water sources, Airdrop's source of water is abundant - the air - and so it can be used anywhere in the world.

It delivers the water to the roots of crops in dry areas by pushing air through a network of underground pipes, cooling it down to the point where water condenses. The water is then pumped to the roots of plants, which Linacre said was the most efficient irrigation method.

"I made several prototypes, some of them still sitting in my mum's backyard, but now with the £10,000 from the James Dyson award I'm going to be able to look at a large scale, agricultural scale prototype," he said.

Linacre was inspired by the Namib beetle, which survives in landscapes that get just half an inch of rain per year by consuming the dew it collects on the hydrophilic skin of its back. Similarly, the desert rhubarb can harvest 16 times the amount of water than other plants in its region by using deep water chanelling cavities in its leaves.

Read full article in The Sydney Morning Herald