Water harvesting from fog using building envelopes: part I

Abstract

New sources of clean water are currently being researched and implemented, to face global water shortage. Techniques such as desalination or cloud seeding can have a high yield but present problems such as excessive energy consumption or consistent environmental impacts. Fog harvesting stands out for being considerably simpler and inexpensive compared to the previous. In the last decades researchers have developed detailed studies and numerical models, supported by a number of successful examples located mainly in arid or seasonally arid climates. This study surveys existing methods to collect water from fog, such as drop coalescence on vertically placed meshes, chemical absorption and desorption and radiative condensers. Yields from different collectors are compared and some considerations on influencing climatic factors are discussed, suggesting that radiative systems may be applied on building envelopes as collection devices. A follow‐up paper will present experimental results on applying radiative collection systems in buildings.

Sponge Town: Addressing Water Crisis for Future Urban Development in Malaysia

“…Water harvesting from fog using building envelops, the journal has provided the best practice of atmospheric water harvesting method by carried out experimental and analysis. There are three types of fog harvesting systems which are mesh collector system, chemical fog collector and flat fog condenser; experiment with the three types of systems has been carried in South America, Middle East Countries, South Africa and India (Caldas et al [4]).…”

Recent Development of Atmospheric Water Harvesting Materials: A Review

“…On the other hand, the fog harvesting refers to the continuous accumulation of supersaturated small water droplets (fog) to form large water droplets, which are eventually collected on cold structural surfaces. In the past decade, this phenomenon has been observed in dense metal networks and spider webs and a variety of network materials with different structures, shapes, angles, and mesh densities for saturated water harvesting have been developed. , Notably, various saturated water harvesting systems that consume electricity to condense water have been developed and reviewed elsewhere, however this review will focus on spontaneous saturated water harvesting materials.…”

Learning from plants: a new framework to approach water-harvesting design concepts

“…A sustainable alternative for the supply of water rather than traditional sources has the advantage of avoiding the environmental risks connected to desalination and cloud seeding. Water production would also be local, allowing for consistent savings in the infrastructural system use (Caldas et al , 2018).…”

“…A sustainable alternative for the supply of water rather than traditional sources has the advantage of avoiding the environmental risks connected to desalination and cloud seeding. Water production would also be local, allowing for consistent savings in the infrastructural system use (Caldas et al, 2018). Using water-harvesting principles and their influential factors, including scale, climate features, material and geometry, have outlined the current plant-inspired design (Table 3).…”