Turn your sweat into drinking water

As gross as it may sound, an engineer called Andreas Hammar has built the ‘Sweat Machine', a device which can purify sweat into drinking water. Unicef helped to drive the project and they say they hope that the device will raise awareness of shortages of drinking water in parts of the world.

Unicef invited visitors and footballers at last week's Gothia Cup Football tournament to sample a glass.

While it may seem like you would be drinking someone else's sweat the system has a filtration system. This was developed by HVR and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and is called ‘Membrane Distillation'.

This system incorporates a plastic cassette. The water is heated into vapor and circulated between the two membranes. The other sides are cold. The vapor is forced through the membranes and this causes ‘the absolute separation of all non volatile substances.'

The Sweat Machine produces drinking water which is cleaner than water from Swedish faucets, according to Hammar himself. Hammar spoke to the BBC and said that one sweaty t-shirt normally provides around 10 ml of water – or only one mouthful.

Kitguru says: This device could be potentially lifesaving in more troubled parts of the world.

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