Could This be Our Future – Fog Harvesting Cities
Due to the water shortage and contamination of our water, this could be our future.
Fog is moisture. And in some places in the world, it’s the only kind of moisture. This is true in the Atacama Desert – the world’s driest desert – which runs along the west coast of South America through Chile and Peru. In the Atacama it never rains.
Water is an essential resource to survive, yet there are over a billion people that don’t have assess to reliable drinking water.
Water is often scarce in communities located at high altitudes. Fog collection technology can provide a solution.
For many years Eritrea has been harvesting fresh water from fog. It has helped provide drinking water for the community in Nepal, as well as in Yemen, Morocco, Chili and Ethiopia.
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Fog collectors are vertical panels of polyethylene mesh that collects water from fog and channels it to a water storage tank. The sun naturally desalinates the water.
A family of coated meshes with a directed stream of fog droplets to simulate a natural foggy environment and demonstrate a five-fold enhancement in the fog-collecting efficiency of a conventional polyolefin mesh. The design rules developed in this work can be applied to select a mesh surface with optimal topography and wetting characteristics to harvest enhanced water fluxes over a wide range of natural convected fog environments.
For more info on the mesh click here
The system is placed on hill tops in areas with persistent fog and heavy winds.
A single 4m long x 10m high net can collect up tp 250L of water a day, which is enough for a family.
THE WARKAWATER TOWER is an unlikely structure to find jutting from the Ethiopian landscape. At 30 feet tall and 13 feet wide, it’s not half as big as its namesake tree (which can loom 75 feet tall), but it’s striking nonetheless. The spindly tower, of latticed bamboo lined with orange polyester mesh, isn’t art—though it does kind of look like it. Rather, the structure is designed to wring water out of the air, providing a sustainable source of H2O for developing countries.
Created by Arturo Vittori and his team at Architecture and Vision, the towers harvest water from rain, fog and dew. This isn’t a new idea—people have been doing this for as long as they’ve needed water, often with air wells. Often built as high-rising stone structures, air wells gather moisture from the air and funnel it into a basin for collection. The WarkaWater functions in much the same way, using mesh netting to capture moisture and direct it into hygienic holding tank accessed via a spout.
This approach could be scaled up to building fog-harvesting towers.
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
This is a concept out of Chile. It was a winner of the Holcim Awards “Next Generation” prizes for project visions
For the first time in 2008 , the Holcim Awards competition included a category for the visions of young architects and designers. First prize was presented to architect Alberto Ferandez Gonzalez who was applauded for his coastal fog-harvesting tower concept for Huasco, Chile, which proposes to extract water for agriculture from the “Camanchaca” coastal fog. “Next Generation” 1st prize: Coastal fog-harvesting tower, Huasco, Chile: The tower is 200m high, catching each water particle in the air that comes from the coast to the valley of Huasco River.
San Francisco-based Iwamoto Scott Architecture and Dutch team van Bergen Kolpa Architecten presented futuristic city scenarios to an audience at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) San Francisco.
The architects’ forward-thinking concepts address 21st century challenges like food shortages and climate change. IwamotoScott’s “fog flowers” would harvest San Francisco’s famed fog as part of a “Hydro Net” for the region, and van Bergen Kolpa’s “Park Supermarket” would integrate food production right into the urban fabric of a Dutch city park.
Sources:
ScienceNature
pubs.acs.org
archive.feedblitz
wired
inhabitat
Feature image source
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