Fog Catchers Want to Boost Water Security

Improving the Cost-effectiveness and Expansion Harnessing Fog for Fresh Water in Chile

Fog catchers, fine mesh nets erected on foggy hillsides, capture tiny droplets of water from fog that later, when enough droplets have been caught, drip down into gutters. This fresh water can be stored in tanks. Fog catching has been used in Chile for human consumption and watering for more than 50 years, mostly at altitudes of 600 to 1,200 metres above sea level.

Recent innovations, such as thedevelopment of probes to find the best places to install fog catchers andnovel mesh fabricpromise toboost water capture further.
And now scientists are on the cusp of moving this activity from an artisanal to an industrial level.

Around 2,000 kilometres of the Chilean coast — from south of Arica (Chile's northernmost city) to south of Santiago and including the Atacama Desert, one of the driest areas of the planet — could benefit from this technology.

Community water source

The geographer Pilar Cereceda, who has worked with fog catchers for 34 years, led the project at Chungungo that inspired the teenage Carcuro, until it was eventually abandoned around 2000 after falling into disrepair.

For example, Chile officially celebrated 2013 as a ‘year of innovation' and Cereceda now works with communities, such as the one in Peña Blanca, that have taken on the fog-catching technology. This unusual town has fog catchers for its own use and is leasing some land on a hill to the microbrewery which built a couple of their own fog catchers there. It is also involved in a citizen science project with experimental fog catchers run by the Atacama Desert Centre at the Catholic University of Chile (CDA-UC), a facility Cereceda created in 2006.

Fog collection on industrial scale

In 1980, when she began in this field, there were just geographers working with scarce funding, mostly on basic science and simple measurements.

Now the CDA-UC has a multidisciplinary team, fromengineerstodesigners, who come from different universities in Chile and abroad, including an association with the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

They are researching how to reduce the cost per litre of collecting water from fog, with the aim of making this technology economically competitive as a source of fresh water in northern Chile.

To do this, CDA-UC opened six experimental stations in locations across this area, including Peña Blanca.

Ikea-style fog catchers

The researchers are working on different ways of reducing the costs. First, they are assessing the best places to install fog catchers, which involves measuring the water available in the fog and wind velocity. This is called the ‘liquid water flux'. It is also important to determine the frequency and duration of foggy periods.

Until now, a small fog catcher of one square metre, called a standard fog collector, has been used for studying the available liquid water flux of prospective sites, but it has proven not to be reliable enough. Instead, Richard LeBoeuf, professor at the University of the Andes, Chile, designed a probe that may help map the best places to install fog catchers.

From science to business

However, unlike Carcuro with his Atrapaniebla beer, the CDA-UC group is still searching for a business model. "We are more a technical and scientific team," Rivera admits.

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Source: ScidevNet

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