Fog harvesting: combination and comparison of different methods to maximize the collection efficiency

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.