If you are familiar with the Dune saga, then you know about the stillsuits that the Fremen wore in order to preserve the water. This machine is not that far from that concept, just that it focuses only on sweat from all the bodily fluids.
Perspiration plays the vital role of cooling down the body when making effort or when exposed to high temperatures, so preventing it completely is not really the best thing to do. However, letting all that sweat disappear into thin air is a pity, isn’t it? That is what the researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm must have thought, too, when they invented the Sweat Machine. Assuming that to get potable water out of this people would have to squeeze their sweaty skin over a funnel is wrong, since this is not how the Sweat Machine works.
Engineer and Swedish TV host Andreas Hammar is among the designers of the Sweat Machine. The most important component, the membrane that turns perspiration into potable water, was in turn created by the researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology. Other than that, the device includes a system that heats and spins the clothes so that the liquid gets extracted.
What better occasion to prove the efficiency of the Sweat Machine than at a sports event? The ones attending the Gothia Cup, an international youth soccer tournament held in Sweden, will see with their own eyes how the players Tobias Hysén and Mohammed Ali Khan drink a glass of water obtained from their own sweat. UNICEF, who played an important role in the development of the Sweat Machine, claims that the public can have a taste, too.
Knowing that the United Nations Children’s Fund is involved in this will lead people to assume that the device was built for humanitarian purposes. Such an assumption is not far from the truth, but UNICEF intends to create a more practical solution for the 780 million people who don’t have access to drinkable water.
The Sweat Machine, while a very interesting concept, is not the first of its kind. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have at their disposal a system that turns their sweat and urine into potable water. The space and the desert seem to have in common the scarcity of water, if nothing else.
In case you don’t like sweating, check the Fansee digital temperature fan and the helicopter fan for helicopter fans.
