English: Life buoy post on rocky promontory on the north side of Porth y Gwin The camera point north-westerly across Abraham’s Bosom and towards the South Stack Lighthouse. A fog bank, soon to envelope the whole of Holy Island, can be seen approaching from the Irish Sea. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From the most parched areas of Saudi Arabia to water-scarce areas of the western U.S., the idea of harvesting fog for water is catching on.
Now, a novel approach to this process could help meet affected communities’ needs for the life-essential resource. Scientists describe their new, highly efficient fog collector, inspired by a shorebird’s beak, in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Cheng Luo and his doctoral student, Xin Heng, explain that deserts and semi-arid areas cover about half of the Earth’s land masses. In some of these places, trucks bring in potable water for the people who live there. To find a more sustainable way to get water, these communities, which can’t draw water from underground or surface supplies, have turned to the air — and to nature for inspiration. They implement methods adapted from those that desert beetles, cacti and grasses use to catch water from the misty fog when it rolls in. But existing techniques require complicated, costly processes or collect only a small fraction of the water that fog has to offer. For new ideas, Luo’s team turned to shorebirds with long, thin beaks.
By opening and closing their beaks, shorebirds drive food-containing liquid drops into their throats. The researchers mimicked this phenomenon by building simple, fog-collecting, rectangular “beaks” out of glass plates connected by a hinge on one side. When open, the plates provide a large surface area where beads of fog condense. When the plates close, then re-open, the droplets slide toward the hinge and into a collection tube. A single 10-inch by 4-inch prototype “swallowed” about a tablespoon of water in 36 minutes. Over two hours, it harvested 400 to 900 times more water than both natural and other artificial fog-collectors.
The Latest on: Collect water from fog
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The Latest on: Collect water from fog
- How Practical Is Harvesting Water From The Air?on September 26, 2023 at 5:00 pm
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- Nature of Water Newson September 20, 2023 at 5:00 pm
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Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, aka ETH Zurich, have developed new fog nets that can purify water from fog, removing hazardous pollutants in the process. According ...
- This revolutionary solar-powered ‘fog net’ could solve a major pollution problem — here’s how it workson September 20, 2023 at 5:30 am
However, previous iterations of fog nets tended to capture atmospheric pollution alongside the fog water, rendering the contents unsafe to consume or use in cooking. This new system from ETH Zurich ...
- To efficiently harvest water from air, consider the humble spider webon September 7, 2023 at 5:08 am
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- Peru's water shortage: Meet the fog-catchers of Limaon September 3, 2023 at 5:00 pm
Water scarcity is a growing global threat. Lima is one of the driest capitals in the world, but locals have developed a method of collecting water by capturing fog.
- Scientists build better nets to turn fog into usable wateron August 23, 2023 at 9:05 am
making fog a vital water source. Residents in these regions set up nets to capture droplets for daily use. This method yields significant water - collecting hundreds of litres daily from small net ...
- Big Ideaon June 1, 2023 at 7:14 pm
As the challenge of water scarcity has grown globally, fog harvesters—hydrophilic mesh sheets stretched across vertical posts—have emerged as an inexpensive and accessible way to collect water from ...
- Cacti-Inspired Tech Could Keep You Hydrated After the Apocalypseon December 27, 2018 at 2:21 pm
In a study published Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, researchers from OSU describe how cacti, desert grass, and desert beetles collect water from the fog ...
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