Sticky, slippery material pulls fog from the air

• Autores: Leah Crane
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3173, 2018, pág. 10
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Tak-Sing Wong at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues have designed a material that is 200 percent more efficient at harvesting water from fog as the surface chemically bonds with water molecules to collect more drops. They carved grooves 20 micrometres deep and 50 micrometres wide into a silicon sheet to give a larger surface area for water molecules to attach to, and the sheet was coated with a liquid hydrophilic lubricant to which water can bond which makes the droplets stick to the surface while allowing them to slide around and coalesce into larger drops and finally be pulled downward off the vertical surface by gravity into a receptacle. The researchers tested their material in a room with a commercial humidifier for two weeks and they found that a square metre of it could collect more than 100 litres of water per day.