However, since 2014 Vena Water has been building atmospheric water generation (AWG) systems in an attempt to take clean water distribution off the grid.
Leveraging atmospheric physics, Vena’s AWG system generates water by using a multi tiered system that operates above ground, below ground and at ground level. At the center of the Vena system is a disk that stretches out across the ground. Beneath this disk lies a a condensing well dug into the earth below. Finally, the Vena AWG utilizes a thermal tower that juts up from the center of its central disk.
As sunlight heats the air inside the thermal tower, the rising gas acts as an ambient pump, pulling cooler air into the AWG system. Once trapped inside the machine, the ambient air is diverted to the systems’ subterranean channels, where it’s cooled to the point that it becomes a moisture-saturated fog. Finally, once that fog has been seeded, the moisture-rich air travels to the condensing chamber at the base of the system, where the fog transforms itself into liquid water as it further cools.
Although Vena’s AWG system seems like a miracle, its designers weren’t satisfied with the first production-ready iteration of their device. For Vena’s brain trust, the goal of the AWG project wasn’t to build a system that could solve a single family’s water security issues—they wanted to solve water scarcity issues for entire regions. With the total daily output of the first AWG systems topping out at 100 liters of water per day, Vena’s lofty goals weren’t being met.
Vena had to pivot to a new design, but that wasn’t going to be easy.
When the first AWG system was produced, Vena didn’t have an engineering team—they didn’t even have a single engineer. Vena’s leadership quickly realized that in order to scale up their design and meet their goals, they’d need a few engineers on the team.
“We brought some engineers into the company, and lo and behold, we got a much better machine,” said Thomas Kosbau, Vena’s cofounder and CTO. But getting to that “better machine” took a ton of work—and the right tools.
As you can imagine, designing an AWG system is fairly complicated. Designs have to be iterated over and over before an advanced prototype, let alone a final product, can be launched. Complicating that matter was the fact that Vena’s team was spread across the globe. For their engineering practice to work in harmony, the Vena team was going to need a CAD package that could be used collaboratively and in the cloud. The team turned to Autodesk’s Fusion 360.
According to Kosbau, Fusion 360 allowed his disparate design team to make a lot of iterations quickly and prove—or disprove—assumptions before they ever built a prototype. Using the software’s native computational fluid dynamic simulations, the Vena team is pushing their designs even further.
Currently, the Vena team is building a 100-gallon-per-day prototype of their new system. If all goes well, the company may only be a few design generations away from their ultimate goal, a machine that can pluck thousands to tens of thousands of gallons of water from the air everyday.
If a machine like that ever finds its way to developing countries, then an emerging threat to world prosperity might be overcome. That’s a powerful statement for engineering and design.