You may be familiar with wind turbines, but have you ever heard of a fog turbine? Unlike their windy cousins, fog turbines aren’t built to generate electricity. Instead, their goal is to collect water from fog.
Fog that forms inland is difficult to harvest as it contains very small and slow-moving water droplets that flow around fog collectors rather than hitting them. A new paper in Advanced Materials overcomes this by using a spinning turbine with blades that mimic cactus spines.
To harvest misty atmospheric fog, the authors found an optimal design with 10 blades angled at 45° operating at 4000 rotations per minute. To test the real-world applicability of the device, the turbine was used in three environments:
- Outside during a fog event
- In controlled laboratory conditions
- As a cooking filter while preparing hot pot
In the outdoor environment, the turbine was over 100 times more efficient at collecting water than conventional meshes, while it cleared dense fog in 40 seconds in the controlled laboratory tests. During 4 hours of cooking, the turbine filtered the oil-smoke mixture without clogging, unlike a standard mesh that quickly became clogged with grease.
Why does this matter?
In regions with fog but no rain, collecting water from atmospheric fog could provide essential water resources, representing a sustainable freshwater source. By manipulating airflow, the turbine built in this study could be an efficient and effective device for defogging, water harvesting and oil fume collection, with applications for many types of slow-moving mists.
Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202522101 from Wiley
Jiaoyang Wu, Guanqiu Qian, Yuehui Zhou, Biao Tong, Wenna Zhou, Suhang Gu, Xuan Guo, Lei Jiang, Chuxin Li and Zhichao Dong, Microdroplet Intaking Spinning Turbine for Active Radiation Fog Harvesting, Adv. Mater., 2026, 0:e22101