posted on 2022-07-07, 10:31authored byKaiteng Zhang, Huawei Chen, Tong Ran, Liwen Zhang, Yi Zhang, Dengke Chen, Yan Wang, Yurun Guo, Guang Liu
Fog
harvesting is an important method to solve the water shortage
in arid and semi-arid areas by collecting water from air. Improving
fog harvesting efficiency is still a big challenge to be overcome.
Herein, under the inspiration of natural creatures, a novel harvesting
structure that couples a hierarchical microchannel (HMC) needle with
the Janus membrane by taking a conical pore as their junction is proposed.
Such an HMC-conical pore-Janus membrane system can improve the harvesting
efficiency by regulation of liquid behavior in the whole fog harvesting
process involving droplet capture from air, high speed transport on
the microchannel, and droplet detachment from Janus. The synergistic
effects of the hierarchical channel-conical pore-Janus structure are
exploited in terms of capture, transport, and detachment capabilities,
and their underlying mechanism to enhance fog harvesting efficiency
is built. Compared with the traditional harvesting structure, the
proposed hierarchical channel-conical-Janus coupling mode was demonstrated
to improve fog harvesting efficiency by 90%. Such a coupled system
has potential applications in efficient fog harvesting systems, microfluidic
devices, and liquid manipulation.