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Abstract To address the global water shortage crisis, one of the promising solutions is to collect freshwater from the environmental resources such as fog. However, the efficiency of conventional fog collectors remains low due to the viscous drag of fog-laden wind deflected around the collecting surface. Here, we show that the three-dimensional and centimetrickirigamistructures can control the wind flow, forming quasi-stable counter-rotating vortices. The vortices regulate the trajectories of incoming fog clusters and eject extensive droplets to the substrate. As the characteristic structural length is increased to the size of vortices, we greatly reduce the dependence of fog collection on the structural delicacy. Together with gravity-directed gathering by the folds, thekirigamifog collector yields a collection efficiency of 16.1% at a low wind speed of 0.8 m/s and is robust against surface characteristics. The collection efficiency is maintained even on a 1 m2collector in an outdoor setting.
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Three-Dimensional Printing of Bioinspired Hierarchical Structures for Enhanced Fog Collection Efficiency in 3D Space via Vat Photopolymerization
Collecting fog water is crucial for dry areas since natural moisture and fog are significant sources of freshwater. Sustainable and energy-efficient water collection systems can take a page out of the cactus’s playbook by mimicking its native fog gathering process. Inspired by the unique geometric structure of the cactus spine, we fabricated a bioinspired artificial fog collector consisting of cactus spines featuring barbs of different sizes and angles on the surfaces for water collection and a series of microcavities within microchannels inspired by Nepenthes Alata on the bottom to facilitate water flowing to the reservoir. However, replicating the actual shape of the cactus spine using conventional manufacturing techniques is challenging, and research in this area has faced a limitation in enhancing water-collecting efficiency. Here, we turned to 3D printing technology (vat photopolymerization) to create bio-mimetic fog collectors with a variety of geometric shapes that would allow for the most effective conveyance and gathering of water. Various barb sizes, angles between each barb in a single array, spine and barb arrangements, and quantity of barbs were tested experimentally and numeric analysis was carried out to measure the volume of water collected and optimize the mass rate. The result shows that optimal fog collection is with a mass flow rate of 0.7433 g/min, with Li = 900 μm, θ = 45°, ϕ = 90°, Nb = 2, and Ns = 5. This study presents a sustainable and ecologically sound method for efficiently collecting humid air, which is expected to be advantageous for the advancement of future-oriented fog-collection, water-transportation, and separation technologies.
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- PAR ID:
- 10578971
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Biomimetics
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 2313-7673
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 734
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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