Regensburg 2007 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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UP: Fachverband Umweltphysik

UP 4: Ozeanographie, Hydro- und Kryosphäre

UP 4.5: Vortrag

Montag, 26. März 2007, 12:45–13:00, H48

Water harvest enhanced by radiation exchange — •Dieter Ihrig¹, Michael Licht¹, Ulrich Brunert¹, Jens Eggemann¹, Andreas Vach¹, and Rainer Mauersberger² — ¹FH Suedwestfalen, Interdis. Zentr. f. Lebenswissenschaften, Frauenstuhlweg 31, 58644 Iserlohn — ²Instituto de RadioAstronomia Milimétrica, E 18012 Granada, Espana

According to the United Nations, lack of drinking water is killing more people than war. Our approach to this urgent problem is to harvest atmospheric water (dew) by using polymer films (LDPE/LLDPE) that are transparent to the atmospheric window at 8 to 13 micron. This allows cooling down a device just by looking through that window into the cold upper atmosphere. To avoid the formation of stable, thermally insulating droplets, patterns of hydrophobic and hydrophilic regions (like those found on the wings of the desert beetle Stenocara) in future have to be etched onto the films. Here we present our device to make use of radiation exchange with the upper atmosphere in order to harvest atmospheric water, including model calculations and show first results of field tests of our device made in Summer 2006 at the IRAM Pico Veleta Observatory (altitude 2900m). This project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 02WD0458)