Dean Kamen’s Solution to the World’s Water Problems

In the News: There is a lot of buzz surrounding the water-purifying machine that Segway inventor Dean Kamen demonstrated on the Colbert Report recently (clip below). Everyone has been trying to find out more about his claim that “you stick a hose into anything that looks wet … and it comes out … as perfect distilled clean water.” So far, it looks like it is all true.

What follows are the numbers behind the hype compiled from a various articles and interviews over the last six years:

• It is designed to supply a village with 1,000 liters/day of clean water. (Colbert Report)
• You can use any water source — ocean, puddle, chemical waste site, hexavalent chrome, arsenic, poison, 50 gallon drum of urine. (Colbert Report)
• Vapor compression distillation is not new. Doing it in such an incredibly efficient way such that it takes only 2 percent of the power of convention distillers is new. (R&D World and Gizmodo commenter)
• The are no filters to replace, no charcoal, no anything disposable (just distillation). (Colbert Report)
• The Slingshot (as its called) can use half the waste heat (450 watts) from a sterling engine electrical generator (prototype also being designed by Kamen’s company) to boil its water. (TED)
• The heat put into the water is recovered with a “counter-flow heat exchanger” and recycled to heat the next batch of water (that is part of the novel bit). (TED and Gizmodo commenter)
• Slingshot will be less then 60 lbs. (TED)
• The prototype slingshot was hand-built for $100K. The goal is to get production units down to $1,000 to $2,000. (CNN)
• The sterling engine, used as an electrical generator, can produce about 200 watts of power (it will never be more then 20 percent efficient) and 800 watts of waste heat (the waste heat that slingshot uses). TED
• Later sources say the sterling engine can generate 1 kilowatt or enough power for 70 high-efficiency light bulbs. (CNN)
• The sterling engine can run on anything that burns, propane or even cow dung. (CNN)
• The slingshot is a David and Goliath reference aimed at putting water and power back in the hands of the individuals. (AP)

Of course, inventing something great is only half the problem – The other half is getting it to the people who need it in a way that works. The new wave of micro-lending could create the pool of money needed to purchase units for groups of entrepreneurs wanting to bring this technology to their village.

According to Kamen, he has developed a microfinance model to support it and may soon be building them in a factory in Bangladesh. “If you could take all the diseases you could name, 80 percent would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,” says Kamen. “This [water purifier] makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don’t care what goes into it. And that [power generator] makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.”

Learn more from articles in The New York Times, and Newsweek.