Today’s army relies on the water that it carries or acquires from the sources available within the areas of its operation. Water is both heavy and heavily used. Therefore there is a clear advantage for Water-from Air machine that may use say 125 gallons of fuel for strategic power generation, also delivers 500 gallons of water as by product.

The objective of this proposal is to demonstrate the feasibility of producing such a machine for the Army and humanitarian relief operations.

The premises of the design will be to extract maximum amount of moisture at the expenditure of minimum amount of energy. To accomplish this goal the moisture in the air needs to be extracted,concentrated and subsequently condensed into water. Traditional desiccant wheel dehumidifiers have been optimized for maximum moisture adsorption since their invention in 1950’s. The regenerative air stream at higher temperature will concentrate the moisture out of the desiccant material ready to be condensed utilizing a high efficiency dehumidifying coil.

The basic design of a water generator machine is depicted here which is prevalent in standard commercial dehumidifiers. All components necessary to design and build a water generation machine are commercially available. The basic design consist of a rotating desiccant wheel (Rotor) made with several thousand layers of corrugated desiccant material. The outside air (process air) is drawn through the desiccant wheel by means of an air handler (process fan) where it yields its moisture content to the desiccant material and exits as dry air. Sometimes the process air is pre-cooled to increase its relative humidity. Another regenerative air handler will draw heated air at the right temperature through a reactivation inlet to absorb the wheel’s moisture contents. This air is then cooled and its moisture contents are condensed as water. The final condensate may be filtered to drinking water standards to alleviate Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and other environmental impurities.