1 out of 5 children die in rural Africa before reaching the age of 5 due to drinking contaminated water. Over 30,000 people die every day as a result of unclean water. Over 2 billion people around the world do not have access to clean water. This causes an incredible amount of human suffering. It also has an in incredible world wide economic impact that costs far more than solving the problem.
The existing approaches solve part of the problem but are sufficiently inadequate that they leave Billions of people without adequate clean water. Some experts believe the only limiting factor is money which is a substantial issue but an even larger issue is that the current set of approaches and technologies simply do not account for the conditions that exist in the poverty stricken countries and as a result either do not work or become many times more expensive which ends up consuming all the available money while still leaving billions without potable water.
A new solution is needed that can be widely deployed and which bypasses the weaknesses of the existing solutions so well. It needs to be cost effective and so robust that it can dramatically increase the number of people who receive clean safe drinking water on a daily basis and this solution must be capable of surviving in the worst conditions while continuing to operate where power, fuel and water pressure are not available.
There are a lot of different ways available to solve the problem but they encounter difficulties that limit their usefulness.
The most common solution of digging new wells works sometimes but many of these wells are shallow and highly susceptible to contamination while others are contaminated by arsenic, lead and fluoride.
The sophisticated filter systems deployed in America like 4 stage Reverse Osmosis are great but they make assumptions that just are not viable in the poverty stricken countries like having constant water pressure or having customers who are spend hundreds of dollars per year on replacement filters and they have a terrible tendency of becoming clogged by hard water which is almost a rule from hand dug wells.
The most primitive option of boiling the water or adding Chlorine works as long as there are only biological contaminants but boiling actually makes the situation worse if salts, arsenic or lead are the problem and in many instances. In the poorest areas people have no wood to burn and can not afford the Chlorine every day. Some try to burn cow dung but that is extremely dangerous and has been shown to cause blindness.
In many countries the worst problems occur during droughts where during the hottest part of the summer the only sources of moister may be mud or damp sand or if they are lucky a salt water beach. Most filters simply will not work with mud or sand and sea water would immediately kill most of the others so again it leaves the people in incredible need.
Our portable drinking water purification system 3 to 8 gallons of highly purified water per day from many moisture sources including salt water, lakes, rivers, and swamps, damp sand and vegetable matter.
It operates without power, without fuel, without chemicals, without replacement filters, and without pumping or fire and is immune to clogging.
It stores in a 20 pound package the size of a briefcase and can operate continuously years with only simple maintenance and cleaning.
This technology is the critical link needed to supply the world's children with clean water. It was designed to specifically overcome issues that have limited the success of prior efforts and which are common in poor countries such as muddy and impassible roads, contaminated wells, no safe surface water, no high tech replacement parts being available, No electricity or fuel and no money to pay for it if it is available.
It is absolutely critical in areas where the wells contain lead, other dangerous minerals or have become contaminated or are even at serious risk of becoming contaminated.
Our system is designed to be deployed in conditions where the clean water is not available from local wells and where there is a substantial amount of contaminated water available.
We started the design from extensive experience where we have purchased and tested a number of water purification systems and as a result we intentionally avoided membrane type reverse osmosis filters which are just too fragile, prone to clogging and fairly expensive to replace when they do get clogged.
We also avoided any chemical based systems on the premise that our users would not be able to pay for replacement chemicals and that they would not want the taste or long term health impact of some of the more common chemicals.
We are accepting pre-orders from qualified buyers today. The minimum order quantity is 500 units which will allow us to provide them a budgetary estimate of $450 each is reasonable. The cost drops rapidly at quantities above 5,000 units. The lead time for shipping is 12 to 15 weeks after we receive the pre-paid orders. Very large orders should confirm ship times since we may have to order additional parts.
Orders are generally filled in the order received and while we designed to make it easy To scale up production to millions of units per month it still takes time. Please get your orders in early to avoid being trapped in queue behind others.
Operation is simple. When the unit is removed from the package and spread in the sun it will self inflate and then it can be anchored over water or another moisture source and will then start producing water.
We designed the first version to be readily carried by an adult woman for long distances. We used 20 pounds as the basis for the design which also limited the amount of water a single unit could produce. We figure at 4 gallons per day the smaller version is good for a household of 4 people but could keep 8 alive for a period of time.
We specifically designed for areas where there the people could not afford to buy traditional fuels such as Kerosene or Electricity and where they have inadequate wood to burn so they are reduced to burning cow manure for cooking. With this in mind our unit uses energy received from the sun to power all it's processes.
Ultimately these units are going to be deployed in volume by the large relief agencies. We need those people who are interested in this problem and who have influence with the primary decision makers at these agencies to give us referrals with strong references. In particular if you know of people on the ground who are managing relief projects in these countries we need to know these people to help build demand from the field.
If you are a reporter or know journalists who are interested in humanitarian special interest stories then we would greatly appreciate referrals as every story printed Or ran helps expose more people
We are willing to meet with qualified investors who have a strong interest in Humanitarian projects especially those with experience in serving the people who are too well off to be helped by humanitarian agencies but who are still facing water issues like the women living in Rural India who are walking 5 hours per day to fetch water.
The unit based on a solar powered motor system. For larger units a thermal differential motor is available which means that it runs off the temperature difference between what it's collectors are able to gather and the local water or ground temperature. The thermal differential motors require a minimum solar concentration that yields temperature differentials in excess of 220F. A Stirling motor version can operate on temperature differentials as low as 30F but are heavier and more expensive.
Because the thermal differential versions uses temperature differential those units can actually run at night if the night time air is sufficiently cold or sufficiently warm. It can also run between of the temperature differential between sun and shade if for some reason we can not use the water.
The basic heat differential engine process was patented by Robert Stirling in the 1800's but we have our own special twists. Striling type heat engines have long had a reputation for being heavy and producing a lot vibration which required high precision machining and engineering but we have been able to merge the physics behind the Striling process with turbine technology to obtain a unit that produces no vibration and one of the most powerful motors per pound available anywhere.
We use a partial vacuum distillation process which was discussed by Tesla in the early 1900s and is used extensively in very large ocean water purification products although most of them use heat based distillation
The partial vacuum distillation approach first patented in 1957 on patent # 2975107 is what allows us to eliminate the need for replacement filters. Our active components never touch anything except water vapor so they do not need replacement. The key advantage is our adaptation of thermal engines to turbine technology that gave us the platform we needed to for the next layer which extends the thermal turbine and combines it with a pump turbine that gives us a inexpensive thermal powered pump that is easy to fabricates and has good maintenance characteristics.
In effect we are able to suck the water vapor right out the contaminated or suspect water while leaving the contaminants behind. We can do this while the original water is way below boiling due to the same physics principle that would allow water to boil at room temperature if it was exposed to the vacuum of outer space. We apply enough vacuum so that water can evaporate substantially faster that normal and with substantially less energy than is needed to heat it to a boil.
Water distillation is one of the most effective mechanisms for purifying water available today. It competes with the high end reverse osmosis filters for the cleanest water and when combined with an ozone treatment will provide NSF-53 rated purification. Distillation has always been expensive due to it's energy demands but with our proprietary thermal powered motors we have brought the cost down to where it is immediately competitive with any purification strategy and when compared over a 10 year period much less expensive.
To better explain where the XDOBS solution can help each of the approaches commonly used is examined along with common problems with that solution and how the XDOBS solution could help in that instance.
To illustrate the problems we will use Los Angeles in the scenario of a major earthquake although many of things are similar or identical for a major disaster such as Katrina. In this instance most major bridges and freeways can be assumed unsafe or destroyed and there is large scale disruption of surface roads such that a majority of bridges over canals and rivers are also either destroyed or at risk which makes even making it across a small part of the town almost impossible by ground. This condition would effectively prevent the entire population from evacuating and will also prevent transport of supplies in by land and will greatly hinder distribution of supplies around the city and surrounding metropolitan areas. In the instance of Katrina the major freeway bridges needed to haul supplies in where damaged and unusable so this scenario is reasonable but the key difference is there was sufficient warning to evacuate most population which placed a dramatically lower demand on the emergency workers than would have been the case of an earthquake that struck without warning.
Call 800-658-8745. or Send our sales department an email.
| (C) XDOBS.COM
- Oct 2005 - All rights Reserved |
This discussion contains forward looking statements which are based on current expectations and differences can be expected. All statements and expressions are the opinion of management of XDOBS and are not meant to be either investment advice or a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold securities. Many of these statements are based on sound economic reasoning, however actual response of the economy is heavily influenced by politics and large business and so the outcome could end up substantially different.