Young Scientist Alert!
by on 05. 5.05
Our buddies at Worldchanging have a problem. Antarctic explorer Ben Saunders is going south in October, and they want it to be a green expedition (do we need different words for Antarctica? no soot, no residue, lets call it a white expedition.) Current practice for making drinking water involves burning lots of white gas to melt snow, and most of the suggestions lean to solar collectors and evacuated tubes (glass and pretty fragile). This treehugger's suggestion of a couple of pounds of metallic sodium to be tossed into the snow to make lovely explosions and puddles of water was not well received. Do you have any better ideas? read ::Worldchanging by [LA]
I've seen some cool things done with fresnal lenses as well as arrays of (plastic) mirrors pointed properly.
For ideas on an array of mirrors (which will get things REALLY hot REALLY fast check out http://www.amasci.com/amateur/mirror.html
How much water are we talking about here? You might be able to use a solar oven if there's enough sunlight. The most reliable way would be to use a heating element powered by a rechargeable battery or fuel cell. Then you could use solar or wind to power back up. But all that would be pretty hard to lug around. It would cool if there was somethng like a camelback you could fill with snow and then use the body's electric field and waste heat to melt it as you walked.
Try wind. Small, lightweight handheld pinwheel-sized wind. Will generate way more electricity (compared to solar) when the wind is blowing, and my impression is that the wind is always blowing? May be better to do some sort of direct frictional heating than to generate electricity and then convert to heat....
I could be wrong, but that would be my first go at it.
Perhaps not fast enough but some sort of light focusing reflector or lens, ala:
http://www.trackertrail.com/survival/fire/cokeandchocolatebar/
what about a solar still. We all learned about them in boy scouts. Maybe two or three of them... or maybe a HUGE one.
you can even buy one in a kit :
http://www.speedplastics.co.uk/solar-still-technical.html
Then again, it may be too damn cold there for this idea. Maybe they should bring down the swedish swim team so that they use body heat to melt the ice and snow.