In Chile, the Atacama Desert is widely described as one of the driest places on Earth, with parts of it going years at a time with almost no rainfall. Yet the dense fog known as the camanchaca moves across Chile's arid coastal region daily, carrying fresh water that largely goes uncollected. Researchers at MIT found a simple way to harness this underused resource without developing complex technology. Instead, they innovated on existing mesh nets. By adjusting fiber diameter and the mesh coating, the engineers created a fog collector that captured far more water than existing designs.
How the MIT fog-harvesting mesh works
According to MIT News, engineers at MIT worked with researchers in Chile to create a mesh for fog collectors. They found that this new mesh can catch much more water than the nets people use around the world. The findings were published in the journal Langmuir under the title "Design of Permeable Fiber Network Structures for Fog Harvesting." The people who did this study are Kyoo-Chul Park, Shreerang Chhatre, Siddarth Srinivasan, Robert Cohen, and Gareth McKinley. The mesh design remains an important basis for fog-harvesting research today.
Why fog can provide water
Rainfall is not the only source of freshwater from the sky. For example, in coastal desert regions, fog often comes from the ocean rather than from rain. Plants, animals, and people in these areas have relied on fog for water for many years. MIT's team aimed to achieve this on a much larger scale. A simple mesh-net system is used to harvest water from fog in more than 17 countries. However, the major problem here is efficiency. Most nets use plastic with relatively large fibers.
