A Comparison of the Efficiency Between Fog Collecting Meshes

Abstract:

Precipitation is the most recognized source of water; however, significant amounts of water reside in the air in the form of fog. Standard fog collectors designed by Schemenauer (Schemenauer and Cereceda, 1993) utilize a 1.00 square meter of a specific polypropylene fabric called Coresa with a 35% Raschel shade coefficient to capture and coalesce tiny fog droplets into larger drops that fall into a trough and are measured by a tipping bucket rain gauge. In this study, we compare three different types of mesh; the Chilean Coresa mesh mentioned above, a German mesh called FogHa-Tin, and an optimized mesh designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a POSS-PEMA dipped metallic mesh (Park et al, 2013). These meshes vary greatly in composition, as well as price.

In order to determine which mesh is most optimal for fog collection in a variety of meteorological conditions, standard collectors of each type described above with a mesh area of 1.00 square meter have been placed at five locations around central California with accompanying meteorological instrumentation. This project will report on the effectiveness of each of these passive fog collectors in conjunction with accompanying meteorological data.