Beetle-like structured microfibers for rapid water harvesting

Abstract

Water harvesting in arid and semi-arid areas gains increasing attention, and harvesting water from the atmosphere are one of the effective ways to solve this problem. This work provides a structured microfiber coated with a beetle-like coating to obtain highly efficient water harvesting through self-induced drops jumping, drops sweeping and droplets collision. Then, the water collection efficiency of the beetle-like fiber is ∼4.7 times that of the lotus-like fiber and ∼4 times that of the initial fiber. Further more, the beetle-like harp structure exhibits a high water collection rate up to ∼2.6 × 104 g/m2/h, and the beetle-like network with a high water collection efficiency of ∼6.5 × 104 g/m2/h. These findings are considered instrumental in the further design and implementation of bionic microfiber for cost-efficient atmospheric water harvesting, industrial vapor recovery and seawater desalination, etc.