Segway’s creator, Dean Kamen, just keeps on inventing.
According to Start Up Journal , his company which is funded by research and development contracts mainly for medical research is currently working on two items that will provide survival essentials and infrastructure for entrepreneurship in the Third World…
A portable water purifier and new breed of generator.
Mr. Kamen saw the Segway as a way to combat pollution and traffic congestion in the industrialized world’s cities, but he imagines his power generator and water purifier could drive huge advances in the basics of life in parts of Africa, Asia and Central America.
The power generator, a kind of machine known as a Stirling engine, comes in various sizes, ranging from 50 pounds to 300 pounds and can output between 400 and 5,000 watts of power; in late 2005 it kept two villages in Bangladesh running on electric power systems for 24 weeks while using only cow dung for fuel.
The water purifier, a 300-pound, dishwasher-sized machine, will use vapor compression distillation, an existing technology that purifies water by vaporizing it and returning it to a liquid state with the impurities separated out. The end result, Deka says: 40 gallons of water an hour. Deka says the water purifier is still a prototype and not nearly as close to market as the engine; the company is working with a nonprofit group, Safe Water Network, to make the technology work more efficiently and on a smaller scale.
No comments yet.