Public Specs And Shared-Thread Notes¶
This page separates three different things:
- public claims made by DEKA, Coca-Cola, Dartmouth, and WHO-linked reporting
- working notes extracted from the shared ChatGPT thread you linked
- OpenSling reconstruction choices made because the exact production design is not fully public
What Is Publicly Documented¶
| Item | Shared-thread note | Public evidence | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treatment method | Vapor-compression distillation / mechanical vapor recompression | DEKA says Slingshot uses vapor compression distillation.1 | Verified |
| Water sources | “Any dirty water,” including sewage | Coca-Cola’s 2012 release says the system can boil and evaporate river water, ocean water, and raw sewage, then condense pure water.2 | Verified public claim |
| Output | Around 1000 L/day or 10 gal/hour | Coca-Cola’s 2012 release and Dartmouth’s 2014 article both repeat about 10 gallons of clean water an hour; Coca-Cola also states up to 300,000 liters per year.23 | Verified public claim |
| Power draw | Roughly 500 W to under 1 kW | Dartmouth and Coca-Cola both say less than 1 kW; the shared thread also mentioned a secondary-report figure of 500 W.234 | <1 kW is public; 500 W should be treated as secondary-report territory |
| Physical scale | About the size of a mini-bar fridge | Dartmouth describes it as equal to a hotel mini-bar fridge.3 | Verified public claim |
| Maintenance posture | Few moving parts, low ongoing maintenance | Dartmouth and DEKA describe low moving-part count and low maintenance needs.31 | Verified public claim |
| Core evaporator geometry | Copper tubes with plastic dowels making a thin film | DEKA’s public Slingshot page states that the evaporator uses copper tubes with plastic dowels to form a thin film.1 | Verified |
| Pressure lift | Compressor raises steam from 7 psi to 9 psi | DEKA states this directly on the public Slingshot page.1 | Verified |
| Power-source flexibility | Grid, batteries, solar, or Stirling generation | Coca-Cola’s 2012 release explicitly mentions grid, batteries, solar cells, and DEKA’s Stirling generator powered by biogas.2 | Verified public claim |
What The Shared Thread Added¶
The shared thread is useful because it pushed the public record into a more build-oriented interpretation:
- It identified the Slingshot concept as a water-vapor heat pump, not simple one-pass boiling.
- It treated the pressure lift as a small differential that makes latent-heat recycling plausible.
- It emphasized a counterflow heat exchanger, mist elimination before compression, and blowdown handling as essential pieces of the open design.4
- It argued that an exact under-
$2000, full-scale clone is not credible, but a lower-throughput open reference machine is more realistic.4
Where The Shared Thread Was Inference¶
Some details in the thread are best treated as engineering hypotheses, not verified Slingshot facts:
| Thread claim | Why it matters | Current status |
|---|---|---|
| Regenerative blower as the default compressor | Drives motor selection, noise, and moisture tolerance | Reasonable inference, but not fully confirmed as the only public production implementation |
| 1.5-2 psi preferred differential across the blower | Critical for compressor sizing | Supported by patent-family reasoning in the thread, but not stated on DEKA’s public marketing page |
| Three parallel 100 ft stainless coils in a pressurized shell | Strongly shapes the open build | This is an OpenSling design proposal, not a public Slingshot bill of materials |
| 600-800 L/day baseline, 1000 L/day stretch for a practical open build | Useful for scoping fabrication and testing | OpenSling design target, not a historical Slingshot spec |
OpenSling Position¶
OpenSling is not pretending to possess the hidden factory drawings for Slingshot. The approach here is:
- take the publicly documented mechanism seriously
- preserve only the parts that are actually evidenced
- make reconstruction choices explicit
- publish enough design detail that another builder can improve the system