Antitangling and manufacturable Fog Harps for high-efficiency water harvesting

Abstract

Fog Harps harvest substantially more water than conventional mesh-based harvesters. However, to date, all large-scale Fog Harps have been impractically hand-wound at low wire tensions and suffer from elastocapillary wire tangling. Here, we develop large-scale and high-tension Fog Harps that are manufacturable and antitangling. These Fog Harps retain the record-setting fog harvesting efficiency ($\eta \approx 17$%) of their optimized scale-model counterparts, while uniquely enabling practical real-life implementation. Manufacturability was achieved by adapting the industrial process for making harp screens, a pre-existing technology used for screening solid materials. The critical tension required to minimize wire tangling was rationalized by an improved elastocapillary tangling model.