Interview with Dean Kamen

[liberty16]

I saw an interesting interview with Dean Kamen on the Colbert Report last night about a new water distiller he invented at his DEKA research company. You can watch the 6 min interview here: Interview - Dean Kamen | The Colbert Report | Comedy Central

This Vapor-Compression-Distiller looks really interesting, and although he does not give too many technical details, I was wondering if this would be more efficient than water-makers. Kamen mentioned that it does not use any membranes or reverse osmosis. We have some pretty tech-savvy members, I was wondering what your impression is of this new technology and its possible applications to water production on sailboats.

[Pblais]

About the only technical detail I heard was 1,000 liters / day or about 11 gallons per hour. That isn't huge volume but isn't a bad except if you are attempting to cruise with multiple teenagers. The physical size of the device seemed a bit large but not unusually so.

The real question we need the answer to is watts of power per hour.

[dacust]

It weighs about 300 lbs.

And he has in process a sterling engine generator weighing between 50-300lbs producing from 400-5000 watts of power.

No data on consumption vs output...

Wall Street Journal article:
Where Are They: Dean Kamen - WSJ.com

[Pblais]

Dean and DEKA have done some pretty amazing things in the past. Some have been more hype and less delivery but he has some great talent working on the various projects. He is worth watching that is for sure.

I'm not sure this is headed in a direction for cruising or not. It's clearly not his goal to solve boating issues so expectations shouldn't be that high. You don't get technology like this by accident.

The sterling engine comes up a lot from time to time but never goes any place.