Veolia Water Technologies by GineersNow Engineering Magazine GineersNow Engineering Magazine September 2016 | Page 28

How Do
Companies
Waterproof
Your
Devices?
Who doesn’t want a
waterproof smartphone? I
mean, you can carry it around
without the fear of water
wrecking your smartphone’s
internal parts. You can use it
underwater or while in the
shower too, to optimize your
smartphone use. While that
is convenient to some ready-
made waterproof devices,
there are companies willing
to coat your existing device to
make them waterproof.
P2i has offered a solution
by coating devices with
invisible,
water-repelling
nano-polymers. But this is only
28
SEPTEMBER 2016
Clean Water Technologies
limited to splashes and not
submersion. So if you’re fine
with that, P2i is the company
you are looking for.
But there’s HzO in Utah and
Liquipel in California able
to make your smartphones
repel water totally. These
companies place the device
inside a sealed chamber, in
which the air is sucked out
after and injected with
a carbon-based gas. The
vapor is let to settle on the
smartphone parts and soon
solidifies as a transparent
layer that is one thousandth
the thickness of a human hair.
Photo by Inhabitat
Voila, you have a waterproof
cellphone. The next time your
waterproofed smartphone is
exposed to water, the water
beads up and just rolls off.
HzO specializes in protecting
your smartphone’s internal
parts such as processors and
sensors, while Liquipel coats
both the interior and the
exterior.
This makes you want to
waterproof your smartphone
now, eh?