Fog-Harvesting potential of metal coated polyester fabrics

Fog is a suitable, low cost and useful source to supply drinking water. Collecting water from foggy air is performed by positioning fabrics in front of it. Characteristics and properties of the used fabrics significantly affect the fog collection efficiency. In the present study polyester fabrics with three texture types including tufted, spacer and weft knitting were coated with nickel by electroless method to improve amount of water collected from fog by roughening surface (to improve nucleation sites of drops) and enhance conductivity. SEM images showed improvement in surface roughness. Water collected from fog improves in order to more than 300% for tufted coated sample. Electrical conductivity of fabrics showed intensive improvement by coating metal. EDX analysis revealed nickel is on the surface of coated tufted sample. Metal layer on the samples showed proper fastness. Moisture content was reduced by coating samples and it means the weight of the fabrics does not improve so much while collecting fog from the air. Air permeability of the coated samples had shown rare decrease and it is a good result to apply the fabrics for fog collection.