Proceedings of the 2020 Mississippi Water Resources Conference

Year: 2020 Authors: Azeem M., Wiener J.

The shortage of clean water in some parts of the world has compelled the researchers to find the alternative fresh water resources. On the coastal side, fog stands out alternative water sources because fog water can be harvested in large quantity without consuming energy. However, fog collection has attracted the interest in recent years resulting in a large body of work focused on improving the design of fog collectors. We designed a two-layer harp structure in comparison with traditional Raschel mesh being used from many years. Polypropylene (PP) monofilament was used as collector element. It was reported that two-layer harp collectors can resolve many of the problem incorporated with single-layered collectors, including clogging. Fog water collection rate by this technique was measured double than Raschel mesh. The diameter of monofilament and distance between the two layers was also optimized with experimental and theoretical work. The results showed that, the distance between the adjacent elements of the harp was > 1mm to avoid from clogging. When optimized, the Raschel mesh collector yielded half of the fog water as compared to our two-layer harp design under laboratory conditions. The basic idea is to increase the efficiency of fog collector for commercial purpose; therefore it was proposed the cylindrical textile monofilaments.