Advanced methods for droplet capture in water recovery systems and agricultural sprays

Water scarcity is one of the important challenges of our century. In this thesis, we investigate advanced methods to mitigate it in two ways: water recovery from fog and reducing chemicals runoff in agriculture. In the first part, we review current fog collector design and identify droplet deviation around the wires of mesh collectors as the main bottleneck in water collection. We introduce an electrostatic force to overcome aerodynamic drag around the collector, using space-charge injection into the fog droplets and an electric field that drives them to the collector. We quantitatively model the collection and show that it scales from a one-wire system to a mesh. We demonstrate increases of up to 50X in collection efficiency, and show that various geometries and designs can be used. In particular, we propose the usage of this method to capture water from industrial condensation plumes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Damak, Maher,Ph. D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kripa K. Varanasi.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122889

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122889