Abstract
Fog harvesting is an unconventional source of water that can be used in some regions with water scarcity to overcome water shortages. The most commonly used collectors are meshes which have intrinsic limitations, the most important of which are clogging and aerodynamic deviation of droplets around the wires. Here, three techniques are compared and combined to overcome these limitations, i.e., replacing the mesh with an array of vertical wires, addition of a hydrophobic layer to the wires, and forcing the ionized droplets to move toward the wires by applying an electric field. The combination of these techniques was found to result in higher fog harvesting efficiency compared to each individual method with the highest impact from the addition of the electric field. The combined methods lead to a 60-fold increase in fog harvesting efficiency compared to meshes. The findings showed that when the fog droplets are forced in an electric field toward the wires, the shading coefficient for collectors can be increased to 1 from 0.55 (maximum for collectors without the electric field) without affecting the fog harvesting efficiency, allowing for lower construction cost of the collectors. Addition of the electric field showed two distinctive promotional effects. First, increasing the aerodynamic efficiency and second, reducing the size of droplets sliding down the wires by disturbing the three-phase contact line and reducing the contact angle hysteresis and the pinning force. Energy analysis shows that this technique can be 100 times more energy efficient compared to the conventional atmospheric water generators.
Highlights
Freshwater availability is becoming an increasing problem worldwide
The highest fog harvesting efficiency was obtained with W0.5-2
The results show that when using the electric field, this general rule is no longer valid and with P/D ratio of 4, the same fog harvesting efficiency can be achieved
Summary
Freshwater availability is becoming an increasing problem worldwide This problem is more likely to occur in arid and semi-arid regions with limited or no precipitation. In such areas, water scarcity is due to the scarcity of the whole freshwater mass, and to the inadequate collection and conservation of water [1, 2]. Among the different sources of unconventional water, fog harvesting has been suggested in recent decades as a potential way to collect water in arid and semi-arid regions. This method is mostly suitable for areas with high humidity and prone to fog formation. Many studies have focused on fog harvesting including the fabrication of biomimetic materials which has shown some success [3, 4]
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