Science had always drawn inspiration from nature – take flight for example. Well, the Namib Desert beetle proved to be an inspiration for NBD Nano co-founder Deckard Sorensen, where this beetle can live in an area which receives a mere 0.5” of rainfall annually, and it survives by drawing 12% of its weight in water from the air in order to prevent it from dying of thirst. Deckard Sorensen decided to work on a similar model, resulting in a self-filling water bottle that will hopefully be able to hit the worldwide market by the time 2014 arrives.
Sorenson intends to mimic nature with a water bottle that has a surface layered with hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings, where a fan is used to pass air over the surface, and it eventually gets water to condense, resulting in a self-filling water bottle.
Sorenson said, “We use nanotechnology to mimic this beetle’s back so that we too can pull water from the air.We see this being applicable to anything from marathon runners to people in third-world countries, because we realize that water is such a large issue in the world today, and we want to try to alleviate those problems with a cost-efficient solution. We are looking to incorporate this in greenhouses or green roofs in the immediate future, and then later on, we’re looking to see how far we can really scale this up to supply maybe farms or larger agricultural goals.”
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