Bioinspired construction of petal-like regenerated PVDF/cellulose fibers for efficient fog harvesting

Abstract

Water collection from atmospheric fog was deemed to be an efficient and sustainable strategy to defuse the freshwater scarcity crisis. Fog harvesting and trapping fibers, therefore, has aroused extensive interest due to their ease of preparation, weave, and use. However, the traditional fibers used in fog collector usually have a low fog collection capacity and efficiency because of their unreasonable morphology and structure design. Herein, we proposed a simple process to construct advanced fibers using a one-step wet spinning of hydrophobic polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and hydrophilic cellulose mixture fiber for fog harvesting. The as-prepared fibers featured a petaloid structure and surface hydrophobic gradient, thus facilitating fog deposition, water droplet formation, and drainage. The unique longitudinal groove structure above enabled the hybrid fiber to achieve an excellent fog collection efficiency of 2750.26 mg/cm2/h per monofilament, which outstripped most of other fiber materials. When woven these fibers were in a longitudinal array network with an interval of 1 mm, and the fog collection efficiency can maintain at 10.30 L/m2/h. Therefore, this work provided a new strategy for further exploration of effective fog collection by cellulose-based fiber materials.