PAIR Seminar: Collecting Fog Droplets Using Microfiber Grids

Biography

Professor Tan, Zhongchao is a Founding Chair Professor, Vice Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs at the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China. Prior to moving back to China, he was a faculty member at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he also served as the founding Executive Director of Tsinghua-Waterloo Joint Research Centre for Energy and Environmental Technologies.

Professor Tan’s contribution to chemical engineering and clean energy has been recognized by international peers, as evidenced by 128 journal articles, and six technical books. His single-authored textbook, Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases, was downloaded 1.7+ million times globally. He was elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2022.

Abstract

Water shortage is one of the biggest challenges that humanity faces. Novel technologies to tackle the challenge of water scarcity are urgently needed. However, all the existing studies are based on bare fibers with diameter in the order of mm. This talk introduces a novel fog collection technology using microfibers fabricated by near-field electrospinning. The collection efficiency reaches a record high level. Systematic investigation reveals that the waterdrops are “visible” to fog droplets in the incoming air flow because of the relatively small size of the microfibers. Thus, the large waterdrops deflect the fog-carrying airflow to the satellite small waterdrops, which effectively intercept the fog droplets.