New fog harvesting processes may help make water more available to the world’s poor. Engineer Shreerang Chhatre is exploring fog harvesting, a way to develop a device to attract the run-off from the morning fog.
With this, poor villagers could collect clean water near their homes, instead of bringing it over the course of hours from streams and wells that are farther away.
Chhatre, a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering at MIT, an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, has a lot on his plate, but he is determined to work this idea through
According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, nearly 900 million people worldwide live without safe drinking water. The burdens falls mostly on women and children to supply for their families.
Chhatre has created a fog-harvesting device that is made of a fence-like mesh panel. This panel attracts droplets and connects to receptacles into which water drips.
Chhatre’s training as a chemical engineer has helped him build a useful prototype.
One basic principle of an efficient device is that it must have a combination of surfaces that attract and repel water.
For larger versions, mesh does the job; these harvesters captured one liter of water per one square meter of mesh, per day in their field tests. The next steps are bringing this into the community.