Please describe your proposed solution.
Droughts it's a extreme event that lead to financial loss each year as a result of global warming, mainly affecting the agricultural sector, causing shortages in production and thus food shortages.
It has been demonstrated that water harvesting from the air can supply small rural communities in arid and semi-arid regions. Water droplets are agglomerated in mesh screens and flow by gravity into a storage facility. The technology is simple and can be maintained and managed by the users.
Orgon Air Water wants to provide this alternative water source for farmers.
The Orgon-AirWater project comprises two phases:
Phase I:
- Design, Construction, Operation of the water supply system, monitoring and evaluation.
- The creation of a decentralized database platform for monitoring environmental parameters (relative humidity, temperature, lighting, CO2, wind) and water productivity per catchment system (level of water captured per day).
Phase II: Implementation of Cardano's blockchain technology with
- Development of a dApp for the construction of an efficient irrigation plan and irrigation scheduling in the crop.
- Creation of a fungible token.
Our proposal for this Fund9, focuses on phase I.
Primary objective: determine the volume of air water capted/day and to verify the accomplished demand in a sustainable manner by obtaining the volume of water collected to relate the relative humidity on the site, and thus calculate the number of air water harvesting systems per hectare of land needed to supply the crop demand.
Phase I. Design, Construction and Operation of the Water Supply System
The prototype will be built in an avocado crop in the state of Michoacán in Mexico, which has shown a decrease in avocado production due to increasingly longer periods of drought, causing economic losses for the farmer and directly affecting the consumer by increasing the price in the market.
The system is divided into 3 stages:
- water production system,
- water reservoir and
- Implementation of equipment to measure environmental parameters and water level.
1.-Water production system
It is a vertical structure of 10 meters high, which will be built with natural materials such as reed (plant) or bamboo, this structure consists of 5 modules that are installed from the bottom up and can be assembled by 4 people without the need for scaffolding. Inside, raschel mesh (made from recyclable materials) will be placed which traps the humidity suspended in the air and causes it to condense, the water droplets slide over the surface of the mesh to the storage tank. The structure will be fixed to the ground with tension cables to withstand strong winds.
The raschel mesh placed on the bamboo structure will occupy an area of 330 square metres, expecting a minimum of 3 litres of water per square metre per day and a maximum of 35 litres per square metre per day, so a minimum of 990 litres of water per day is expected to be collected from the prototype. This data variation is closely related to the environmental factors that will be obtained at the site.
2.-Water reservoir
The storage vessel will be below ground to protect the water from sunlight and kept in the dark, away from all sources of heat, light and atmospheric influences. The material of the storage container shall be terracotta, as it has a suitable porosity to allow the water to breathe, which it, like all other living things, must do to remain alive and healthy. The storage container will have a capacity of 4 cubic metres.
The connection for the water supply will be made with a cyclic hydraulic pump, which uses the kinetic energy of a water hammer on a fluid to extract the water contained in the reservoir to the crop, and therefore does not require external energy input.
3.-Development of prototypes for measuring environmental parameters and water level.
Here we propose the development of two measurement prototypes, one for environmental parameters (temperature, humidity, lighting, CO2 and wind speed) and the other for water level. These devices will communicate by radio frequency with a data concentrator which will have access to the internet, the concentrator will send the data to a platform that will store and present the data.
- Environmental parameters: The device will contain a series of sensors that will collect information and send it by radio frequency to a data concentrator.
- Water level measurement: The device for water level measurement will be an ultrasonic sensor, which collects and sends the data by radio frequency to a data concentrator.
- Data concentrator: The data concentrator is the device in charge of receiving, storing and sending the data from the sensors. This device must have access to the Internet in order to be able to send the data to an online platform. The features of the device are: storage of up to 32 GB of data, Ethernet port and Wifi 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.
- Communication: All devices will communicate with each other by means of a radio frequency transmitter/emitter, it is proposed to use one of the following options: RF69, RF69 CW, RF95 or RF96. All four chips are designed to transmit over long distances with small power consumption.
- Power supply: The environmental parameter and water level device will have a battery and a solar panel that charges the battery. The data concentrator must be connected to a power supply.
The data obtained will be recorded in a Web platform where values of the individual parameters can be consulted in daily, monthly and annual periods.
Phase I. Monitoring and Evaluation
Reports will be made with the values and data obtained to measure the efficiency of water collection and the following calculation will be made.
- Overall Collection Efficiency
The efficiency of air water collection has been attributed to three factors (Ghosh et al., 2015), namely water content in the air, wind and mesh interaction and the drainage of air water from the mesh to the trough. The overall collection efficiency (ηcoll) can be expressed as:
ηcoll = ηae × ηcap × ηdr
where ηae, ηcap and ηdr are the aerodynamic, capture and drainage efficiency, respectively.
Aerodynamic efficiency (ηae) denotes the water droplet fraction in the air that may collide with the mesh. The fraction of actual fog droplet that impinges on the mesh fibers and gets deposited is represented by the capture efficiency (ηcap).The drainage efficiency (ηdr) represents the fraction of the air water that travels to the gutter after colliding with the mesh.
Drainage Efficiency (ηdr), the air water drain from the mesh depends on the size of the droplet, droplet surface tension and the diameter of the mesh bottom.
Depending on the data obtained, the number of air water collection systems per hectare of land required to meet the crop demand will be calculated.
Reference literature: Ghosh, R., Ray, T.K. and Ganguly, R. (2015). Cooling tower fog harvesting in power plants - A pilot study. Energy 89: 1018-1028.
Cardano onboarding
Orgon-AirWater aims to merge a physical world project of social and environmental impact with the Cardano blockchain through sound scientific and analytical methodologies to evaluate and present water productivity and irrigation scheduling data with efficient plans for the farmer and offer the opportunity to help the community and the environment in a sustainable way by generating extended benefits through the monetization of a native Cardano token comprising phase II of this project.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Cardashift aims to empower all human beings to build a sustainable world through the Cardano protocols. Its objective is to represent "real world states of results that people care about", that is why Orgon Air Water matches the objective of this challenge, because our goal is to solve the problem of water scarcity, a problem that is occurring globally and that concerns people, creating a native token linked to physical agriculture with sustainable social and environmental impact, managing the use of water in agriculture, developing new solutions for measurement, analysis and/or traceability, for greater food production.
This project will create real-world impact results, addressing solutions for:
- Droughts in agriculture
- Water scarcity for human consumption
- Declining food production.
- Desertification and deforestation
- Climate change CO2
Because without water there is no life. This project offers the opportunity to help the agricultural sector, the community and the environment in a sustainable way.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Type of risk: Cost
- The geographical location of the system has a direct influence on the total cost of the investment, due to the cost of transporting materials from the nearest locality to the cultivation field, which can vary depending on the distance to be covered, so to solve this point, the aim is to use natural and easily available materials from the localities closest to the location of the cultivation field, thus reducing costs.
- This is a project in development in which we merge a physical world project of social and environmental impact with the cardano blockchain. The risk that could impede the development of this project is the volatility of the market in the exchange of goods and services from ada to dollars.
Type of risk: maintenance and operation
- Maintenance of the system requires monitoring, regular tightening of support cables and mesh, immediate repairs of any minor tears, and care of sensors measuring environmental parameters.
- One of the risks is to make the user aware of the benefits that the air harvesting system can provide and to train the user to keep the system in operation.
Type of risk: visual
- The installation of the air water harvesting system can be visually unattractive, so the design was inspired by the elements and colors of nature to make it more visually pleasing.