Researchers turn fog into clean water
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Technology
Researchers at ETH Zurich developed a method that collects water from fog and simultaneously purifies it.
Researchers from the federal technology institute ETH Zurich presented the findings on Thursday in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability .
So-called fog collectors are nothing new in themselves. They are already used in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Morocco and Oman, ETH Zurich said in a statementExternal link on Thursday.
They work according to a simple principle: fine-meshed nets are hung vertically. When the wind blows through them, small droplets of fog stick to the net. Over time, the droplets grow until they are so heavy that gravity pulls them down. There, the water is collected in a trough. According to the university, up to several hundred litres of water can be obtained in this way in one day with a fog collector that is only a few square metres in size.
“For regions with little rain or spring water, but where fog is a common occurrence, this can be a blessing,” the researchers said.
The problem is that dirt particles in the air are also captured with the water. “In many of the world’s major cities, the air is so polluted that any water harvested from fog isn’t clean enough to be used untreated either for drinking or for cooking,” they said.
Taxonomy
- Water from Air