High-effective fog collection on metal surfaces by temperature gradients

Abstract

The acquisition of global freshwater resources has always been the direction of people's efforts. At present, metal materials based on special wettability and special structure have become an effective way to collect fog. However, it is still a bottleneck to further improve the water collection efficiency by carefully designing the wettability and special structure of materials. Therefore, we propose to use temperature gradient to enhance fog collection in metal surface. The mechanism of temperature gradient enhancement improves fog collection efficiency by 54 % and surface refresh rate by about 541 %. Further scattering measurements show that the capture time of fog particles at low cooling surface is shortened by about 40 %. Based on the theory of heat transfer and thermophoresis, the temperature gradient around the metal and the behavior of fog particles are analyzed, and it is concluded that the enhancement of fog collection performance on the metal surface can be caused by the temperature gradient caused by thermophoresis force. This work provides ideas for designing better fog collection equipment and materials.