International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Fog harvesting is a technique used to collect water from the fog. This technique became widely used around the world due to the lack of fresh water, as fog harvesting is considered to represent an economical and a reliable source of water. On that sense, fog collecting methods are mostly implemented in areas that lack access to fresh water and is mostly used for agricultural purposes and, in some cases, also for providing clean drinking water. The basic idea of harvesting the fog was first developed by farmers when some types of adjoining cavities and containers were put around plants to collect water from humid air, after that those techniques were turned into fog harvesting structures. The introduction of fog harvesting techniques was accompanied with the introduction of new materials and different structures, providing a range of options in regards to the meshes and to the harvesting methods. In this paper, a practical and theoretical assessment of existing fog harvesting meshes is performed in order to characterize their economic and physical characteristics. The final objective is to provide information about their ability to perform in different conditions which is to be added to an environmental conditioning structure for exterior spaces.

Index Terms—Fog harvesting, meshes, embodied energy, pollution potential, environmental impact, economic impact.

The authors are with the University of Minho, Portugal (e-mail: lujainhadba@gmail.com, mendonca@arquitectura.uminho.pt, lsilva@civil.uminho.pt, migcar@det.uminho.pt).

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Cite: L. Hadba, P. Mendonça, L. T. Silva, and M. A. Carvalho, "Selecting Fog Harvesting Meshes for Environmental Conditioning Structures," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 11, no. 12, pp. 540-548, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).