Efficient Water Capture Process with Pentahedral Fog Catcher Design, n Arid Zone Lima

Huaranca Paz C.M.; Yalta L.C.; Benites-Alfaro E. · Chemical Engineering Transactions (2025) · DOI: 10.3303/cet25117083

Resumen

Water scarcity is an increasingly recurrent problem in many parts of the world, especially in arid and coastal areas accentuated by climate change. The water resource is very accessible to populations with scarce economic resources, so finding a way to obtain this resource is a priority. Fog catchers have emerged as a viable solution for capturing water from fog; they are systems that work by condensing the moisture present in the fog through a special mesh that traps it and then channels it into a container. Although fog catchers already exist and have been successfully implemented, there is a continuous effort to improve their efficiency, a key aspect being the design of the fog catcher itself. In that sense, the research aimed to design and build a pentahedral-shaped fog catcher and evaluate its efficiency in capturing fog water compared to a traditional design. As a result, it was obtained that the pentahedral design with a panel area of 45 m2 each, captured an average of 188 litres of water in 24 hours, compared to the traditional design that captured 34.56 litres in the same time, both installed in the same place (at an altitude of 718.6 m.a.s.l.) and in the same meteorological conditions (temperature of around 16 °C and relative humidity of 90.85 to 92.4% on average). It is established that water collection with fog catchers is a viable solution, presenting itself as a sustainable alternative for areas with water scarcity, it does not require traditional water sources nor does it need energy. Copyright

Instituciones: Universidad César Vallejo