Design,Fabrication And Performance Research Of Biomimetic High Efficient Water Collector

It is known that water shortage is becoming increasingly serious.Collecting water from fog flow has emerged as a promising strategy for the relief of water shortage problem.Designing and fabricating high-efficiency water collectors have attracted much attention and research.On the one hand,inspired by natural organisms(such as cactus,beetles and spider silk,etc.),people adopt physical or chemical methods to prepare biomimetic water collectors.On the other hand,the functional structures with special properties(such as Janus structure)can be applied in the field of water collection.In this paper,two kinds of efficient water collectors with different physical structures are designed and manufactured,which provides ideas for the design of efficient water collectors and large-scale manufacturing applications.The main work and results are shown as follows:(1)3D printing technology and UV-induced controlled diffusion method were used to produce the water collector combining the beetle-like hydrophobic-hydrophilic character and cactus-like cone arrays.And then systematically study the influence of different physical structure parameters and the mass ratio of hydrophilic adhesive and hydrophobic adhesive on fog-harvesting performance.It is found that the water collection rate can be optimized by controlling hybrid wettability of sample surface and physical structure parameters such as cone distance and printed holes on substrates,which lead to a 109 % increase of water collection rate.(2)We innovatively introduced the thermal-response deformation physical extrusion behavior,and combined it with the Janus-structure sponge core which is made by simple spraying and prewetting method to design an efficient water collector.This structure which possesses superior repeatability can capture and store water when it is cloudy and moist and release water when it is sunny and hot,which makes the high value of practical application.