Special fog harvesting mode on bioinspired hydrophilic dual-thread spider silk fiber

Abstract

Normal bioinspired spider silk fibers (BSSFs) show effective fog collection abilities but are weak in the rapid transport of captured droplets, which could potentially hinder the further improvement of fog harvesting efficiency. Factually, previous works have shown that the main axis of natural spider silk consists of two separate, parallel threads, similar to the microchannel structure of Sarracenia trichome. This structural feature may be an important factor contributing to the highly efficient fog harvesting ability of spider silks. However, to the best of our knowledge, previous studies on BSSFs have ignored this feature. In this work, inspired by spider silk and Sarracenia trichome, a novel bioinspired hydrophilic dual-thread spider silk fiber (HDSSF) is obtained via a simple dipping coating method to introduce capillary force. On the HDSSF, compared to previous works, a totally different fog harvesting mode was observed, i.e., captured droplets could be rapidly transported to spindle knots under the effect of capillary force and internal Laplace pressure difference via the connectivity of liquid film and no obvious droplets could be observed on the threads. The experimental observations and underlying mechanism analyses have verified that this special fog harvesting mode allows rapid transport and directional collection of droplets to accelerate the surface reconstruction rate, coupled with the high droplet capture ability of fiber, resulting in a significant improvement of fog harvesting efficiency (9.03 g cm−2·h−1, a 590% increase compared with normal BSSF). Such HDSSF is potentially applicable in high-efficiency fog harvesting systems, droplet transport devices and other engineering applications related to fog harvesting.