Bioware fog collectors: the Texas horned lizard as a model for a biomimetic fog-harvesting

The main aim of this research is to demonstrate the potential of surfaces with structural modifications for passive directed fog collection water transport, which might lead to process improvements and reduced resource requirements due to exceedingly controllable transporting of tiny droplets. For this purpose, we analyzed the fog collection efficiency of two various categories of the bio-inspired geometric patterned surface: samples in category A with parallel directional capillary lines of the oneway diodes pattern and category B consist of samples with a network of non-parallel capillary patterns without directional lines. The fog collection efficiency of the samples of each category was tested at different depths and in two hydrophobic and hydrophilic wettability states. In addition to that fog collection efficiency of the samples was compared in each category separately to investigate the influence of microstructures and/or the wettability of the surfaces on fog collection. The results indicate that the Texas horned lizard geometric patterned surface enhanced the effective transport of collecting water tiny water droplets toward the bottom of the surface patterns. The results of these experiments can be materialized to develop an efficient fog collector and planar microfluidics.

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