Abstract
Freshwater shortage has been receiving considerable attention, and water harvesting is one of the potential solutions to this water crisis. Several researchers have tried to improve the harvesting capabilities by changing mesh wettability for atmospheric fog harvesting. However, the wettability effect on water harvesting from white plumes has not yet been investigated thoroughly, despite industrial cooling towers being considered as alternative water resources, because of the large amounts of fog plumes generated. In this study, surface wettability was modified with a robust and simple method for practical scaled-up applications, and we explored the influence of mesh wettability on atmospheric and industrial fog harvesting. In atmospheric fog harvesting, both superhydrophilic meshes (SHPMs), and superhydrophobic meshes (SHBMs) were found to improve the harvesting performance, with superhydrophobic treatments providing the best collection efficiency. In contrast, only superhydrophilicity improves the performance in industrial fog harvesting with flat mesh screens. We hypothesize that this research will be useful for mesh design, as it analyzes the influence of mesh wettability on the performance of water collection in both atmospheric and industrial water harvesting.
Highlights
With the depletion of energy resources, the global crisis regarding freshwater scarcity has received significant attention in both arid and humid environments [1]
Without changing the surface micro/nanostructures, superhydrophobic meshes (SHBMs) was obtained by applying an HDFS self-assembled monolayer (SAM) coating, lowering the surface energy
The mesh wettability was modified successfully through robust and simple methods, which were the formation of hierarchical micro/nanostructures and HDFS SAM coating
Summary
With the depletion of energy resources, the global crisis regarding freshwater scarcity has received significant attention in both arid and humid environments [1]. To acknowledge the significance of this water crisis, the UN announced the period of 2005–2015 as the International Decade for Action “Water for Life” [3], and UNESCO marked 2013 as the International Year for Water Cooperation [4]. Harvesting water to provide a source of good-quality freshwater is one of the potential solutions to the water crisis [5]. The first is dew harvesting, wherein water is collected from the phase change of water vapor to liquid, followed by transportation [6,7,8]. For the nucleation of water vapor on a surface, the surface temperature of a substrate must be lower than that of the surrounding temperature [9]
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