Fog Harvesting with Highly Wetting and Nonwetting Vertical Strips

Highly wetting and nonwetting substrates have been widely used in fogwater collection systems for enhanced water harvesting. In this work, fog harvesting substrates comprising PVC strips of different wetting properties and widths ranging from 1-5 mm were vertically aligned and spaced apart at regular intervals to give the same solid area fraction of 0.8. Evaluation of the water collection efficiencies of the tested configurations revealed that 1 mm wide superhydrophilic strips was the most efficient, achieving double the amount of water harvested compared with 2.8 mm wide strips. This finding was attributed to the low Stokes numbers of the aerosol particle distribution of the fog which tended to result in them being brought by the flow streamlines toward the air gaps between the strips. Stagnant flow regions at the edges of each strip, revealed through potential flow calculations, then caused higher liquid imbibition and impaction there for water harvesting. It was also found that the Cassie nonwetting substrates that originally exhibited contact angles of 161° transformed to Wenzel wetting with zero contact angle within 60 min of fog interception. Optical profilometry revealed no obvious difference in surface roughness between the central region and edges of the strips, indicating that surface morphology was unlikely to be a contributing factor for enhanced water collection at the edges. The findings here indicated that highly wetting vertical strip architectures with narrow widths (1 mm) were favorable over wider strips for water harvesting provided that clogging and re-entrainment were not significant factors.