Artificial spider silk could help us harvest drinking water from air

Synthetic fibres that may acquire water from the air, very similar to how spider silk gathers dew, may very well be used for large-scale water assortment from fog.

In locations the place the provision of ingesting water might be low, harvesting water from air tends to be an energy-intensive course of. Condensation, a standard technique, often requires a floor that’s saved cooler than the air temperature.

Now, Yongmei Zheng at Beihang College in China and her colleagues have designed synthetic microfibre threads coated in spiral-shaped bumps that may passively entice large droplets of water to condense on them.

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