DARPA: DROP THE WATER, DRINK THE AIR

As much as bul­lets or body armor, rations or radios, an army needs water to sur­vive — espe­cially when it’s fight­ing in the blis­ter­ing heat of an Iraqi sum­mer. But haul­ing a soldier’s daily require­ment of three to four gal­lons of water has become a gar­gan­tuan bur­den to U.S. armed forces. So Darpa, the Pentagon’s mad sci­ence divi­sion, has come up with a plan for thirsty GIs: Cut the amount of the water they’re car­ry­ing in half, and pluck the rest from out of thin air.
Even in the parched Mesopotamian desert, the air holds plenty of water. The trick is get­ting it out. Machines have been around for years that can cool the air down to the point where water droplets will con­dense like dew bead­ing on an oak leaf. But they’re energy hogs, using almost 650 watt/​hours just to get a sin­gle quart of H20. The goal of Darpa’s Water Harvesting pro­gram is to extract that water with­out using up so much power.
That would make a huge dif­fer­ence to troops sta­tioned in the Middle East. “With the tem­per­a­tures in August soar­ing well above 125 degrees (Fahrenheit),” writes Chief Warrant Officer Gordon Cimoli, a Black Hawk heli­copter pilot who served 10 months in Iraq, ” water is life.“
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: Several mil­i­tary blog­gers who are cur­rently on duty in Iraq (or who served there recently) weighed in for this story.
“I know myself dur­ing July, the hottest month here, I drank about 10 liters a water a day. I got so sick of water I asked fam­ily and friends to send Koolaid or lemon-​​aid drink mix so I stand to drink that much water,” says Cpl. Michael Whitney. “If you didn’t start drink­ing water first thing in the morn­ing you would start feel­ing symp­toms of dehy­dra­tion by 11 am.“
But for Whitney and his fel­low sol­diers at Camp Cooke, there’s some relief: “a swim­ming pool that opened up in June, which was a wel­come activ­ity for a lot of us want­ing to escape the heat of the day.“
Pools or no, Sgt. Chris Missick notes, “this is an extremely hot region though and hydra­tion is essen­tial, it really can be life or death. Any device that would make it pos­si­ble to endure less of a bur­den in trans­port­ing liq­uids and yet enable sol­diers to retain the nec­es­sary lev­els of hydra­tion would be invalu­able.“
But Marine reservist Daniel Amster is skep­ti­cal. “The last thing I want to do is to carry that amount of weight on me, and depend on it for water, and have the thing not work. If that hap­pens, then the sup­posed ‘gain’ of not car­ry­ing as much water for the oper­a­tion is lost because now I do not have enough water.“
“The Darpa exper­i­ment should be tried but in con­junc­tion with present water sources as to not bring the sup­ply down,” agrees Spc. Ernesto Haibi, a medic serv­ing in Mosul.
“We didn’t have a tremen­dous num­ber of heat casu­al­ties this sum­mer,” observes one blog­ger cur­rently in Iraq. “[But] the ones we did have were mostly due to sol­diers not drink­ing the water they had, rather than not hav­ing enough water. Which just proves the old axiom ‘You can give a sol­dier water but you can’t make him drink.’”

September 22nd, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.