CYBERTRUCK AWG Technology.

[Newton]

Musk did say that he was thinking about adapting some of the technologies from the car to the home and mentioned refrigeration/distillation. This somehow got transmogrified into a distillation apparatus is the truck and no amount of common sense could stifle it for weeks.

There is R134 in the CT, there is a compressor and there are evaporators. Voila, you will be producing water from the A/C system when it is running. But that water will be dumped overboard just as it is today. There is no reason to go to all the trouble necessary to make it potable and pipe it to the cabin. If you want cold water (or martinis) to drink on a road trip invest in an ARB fridge. They hold lots and run on 10 watts or so. If you want to purify water from a mountain stream invest in a small RO unit and plug it into one of the in-bed outlets.

I dont think any1 is debating about there being better, more efficient, cheaper ways to do stuff.
I think it's more deciphering what elon was saying...
"I’m dying to do super efficient, quiet home HVAC with HEPA & water distillation. It’s weird, but I really want to do it."
— Elon Musk

And later "maybe cybertruck will have it..."

The hepa and high efficiency ac, I feel like is already in some of the cars, so what else is there? The distillation.

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[Crissa]

The thing about HVAC has been said more than once; it's a natural extension to their octovalve stuff.

Personally, I always have a flat of water in the car, stuffed under the seats, and on road-trips, I jam then into the gap under the seat so I can grab one or two from under there while in motion.

My spouse has joked that I'm steam-powered.

-Crissa

 

[ajdelange]

What's to distill? In distillation you convert liquid water to vapor and then condense it back to liquid. In proposing to collect the water from the atmosphere you are condensing vapor - half the "distillation" has been done for you already. Why do it again at the cost of appreciable energy? Were one to build a practical system for this purpose he would clean (filter) the air to remove pollen, bacteria, spores, salt particles etc, condense the water out and then run that water through 1-2μ particulate, carbon block and KDF "polishing" filters. This would even get rid of cryptosporidum cysts but if you are still nervous about biologics toss in a UV light. This is, of course exactly, what the commercial products that recover water from the air do. No distillation is involved as it serves no useful function in this application.

And Musk, were he to start manufacturing equipment for this purpose for residential use, wouldn't distill either. Just as the treatment I described above is safer and produces more palatable water in a portable environment so would it in a permanent installation. Were he talking about improving tap (mains or well or river or lake) water he wouldn't distill then either. He would use RO as it is more effective and uses less energy. There are still lots of stills sold for water purification but they are messy, require several passes and have to be cleaned. RO is the way to go. BTW, I wash my X with RO water. As it doesn't leave mineral deposits when it dries it doesn't have to be chamoised off.

 

[Newton]

Perhaps the waste heat from ac or other systems is enough to distill something, making your point about efficiency moot, it would be basically free. I clearly know far less about physics and that stuff than u AJ, but I do know that the ac in my car or house creates a very, very large amount of heat.

Maybe Elon didn't mean "distillation".

And maybe he did and is using this as a way to r and d something they will be using on mars. I couldn't imagine having more ways to get clean water would be a bad thing.

 

[Crissa]

Musk was probably using 'distill' to use as the vapor recovery process of condensation.

Condensator I think would be the word, but it's not common enough yet ^-^

Vaporators is what they called them for moisture farming in Star Wars. It wouldn't be the first time something wasn't named right.

-Crissa

 

[ajdelange]

Clearly he misspoke but people insist on taking his every casual remark literally.

Your A/C does not create heat. It moves heat. That's what it is designed to do. For every KWh of heat it removes it must be given about 500 W of mechanical or electrical energy to run the "pump" so that if you pull 1 kWh of heat out of a room or the car's cabin you must dump 1500 W from the A/C condenser to the ambient. This is done by boiling refrigerant in the space to be cooled, compressing the gas which renders it hot when it comes out of the compressor as it contains the energy from the boiling (the heat removed) plus the energy used to run the compressor, passing that energy to the ambient which results in return to liquid and then sending the liquid back to the boiler. With R410A systems such as are used in a house the temperature of the hot gas is about 120 °F. With R134a as used in a car it is about the same. Neither of these is sufficiently hot to boil water (unless it were done at lower pressure which would, of course, add more complexity to the system). It is, however, hot enough to pre-warm your cold well or mains water and this is done in heat pump systems equipped with "de super heaters".

If you are in even a xeric environment that isn't too cold (Mars is way too xeric and too cold) where you can't easily drill a well then this is a fine way to get clean water at the cost of the electricity it takes to run a compressor, a pump or 2 and a UV lamp. But you can't twist Musk's words or the physics around to prove that the CT will have such a system.

 

[Crissa]

AC creates heat to move heat. For ever KWh it consumes, those kilowatts are thrown out as heat from the pump and condenser, along with the heat the evaporator grabbed from the side it's trying to cool.

Every bit of water that isn't evaporated away on the condensers, there's an additional amount of heat that needs to be shed somewhere else on the system.

-Crissa