2020/01/27 by Musaddaq Azeem, Azeem, Musaddaq, Adrien Guèrin +19
Physics and Astronomy · #Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn) #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #cond-mat.soft #physics.app-ph #physics.flu-dyn
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2001.09953
33 pages, 8 figures (including supplemental material); in press at ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
arxiv created 2020/01/28 · arxiv updated 2020/01/29
The growing concerns over desertification have spurred research into technologies aimed at acquiring water from non-traditional sources such as dew, fog, and water vapor. Some of the most promising developments have focused on improving designs to collect water from fog. However, the absence of a shared framework to predict, measure and compare the water collection efficiencies of new prototypes is becoming a major obstacle to progress in the field. We address this problem by providing a general theory to design efficient fog collectors as well as a concrete experimental protocol to furnish our theory with all the necessary parameters to quantify the effective water collection efficiency. We show in particular that multi-layer collectors are required for high fog collection efficiency and that all efficient designs are found within a narrow range of mesh porosity. We support our conclusions with measurements on simple multi-layer harp collectors.