Harvesting fog to provide drinking water to world'd region

Published on September 9, 2013 02:43 by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Technology

In some of this planet's driest regions, where rainfall is rare or even nonexistent, a few specialized plants and insects have devised ingenious strategies to provide themselves with the water necessary for life: They pull it right out of the air, from fog that drifts in from warm oceans nearby.

Now researchers at MIT, working in collaboration with colleagues in Chile, are seeking to mimic that trick on a much larger scale, potentially supplying significant quantities of clean, potable water in places where there are few alternatives.

Fog harvesting, as the technique is known, is not a new idea: Systems to make use of this airborne potable water already exist in at least 17 nations. But the new research shows that their efficiency in a mild fog condition can be improved by at least fivefold, making them far more feasible and practical than existing versions.

Thenew findingshave just been published online by the journalLangmuir, a publication of the American Chemical Society, in a paper by MIT postdoc Kyoo-Chul Park PhD '13, MIT alumnus Shreerang Chhatre PhD '13, graduate student Siddarth Srinivasan, chemical engineering professor Robert Cohen, and mechanical engineering professor Gareth McKinley.

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