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MIT Develops Advanced Fog Harvesting Material

Inhabitat has a post on advances in water harvesting from fog using biomimicry - MIT Develops Advanced Fog Harvesting Material That Pulls 5x More Water From Thin Air.

Plants and certain animals like the fog beetle can survive in very arid regions because they’ve developed ways of absorbing minute amounts of water from the atmosphere. Learning from their example allowed us to develop fog harvesting technologies – basically giant nets that trap moisture in the foggy mist, and funnel all of the tiny droplets into a container where they add up to water we can drink. Now, scientists at MIT have created an advanced fog-harvesting material that enables these giant mist catchers to generate five times more water ...

Preliminary tests suggest that the new, smaller-pored material can improve efficiency five times in mild fog conditions, making the system far more feasible and practical than existing versions. The team is currently carrying out a year-long test in Chile to study the durability and water yield of different configurations. “Chilean investigators have estimated that if just 4 percent of the water contained in the fog could be captured, that would be sufficient to meet all of the water needs of that nation’s four northernmost regions, encompassing the entire Atacama Desert area,” states the same release.