Fog Generator Improvements<

Final Project Description<

My ongoing PhD thesis is about understanding fog droplets motion around obstacles and more specifically trying to use these understandings to improve fog harvester. Therefore a test bench was built in the lab that allows one to simulate real conditions and test their prototypes.

Exp Setup

It is composed of a fog generator, a laminar air flow generator, two concentric plastic cylinders and two weighing scales. The fog created by the generator is carried away by the laminar air flow and passes around a hanging obstacle. The top weighing scale measures the mass of the fog water deposited on the obstacle while the bottom one measures the mass of the water drained and hence harvested.

A fog harvester efficiency is computed as the ratio between the incoming fog water mass rate and the harvested water mass rate. We easily measure the harvested water mass rate with a scale under the harvester however we can not yet measure the incoming fog water mass rate, at least not directly. For now we simply estimate it by measuring the water tank mass before and after our measurements.

Unfortunately the efficiency of the nebulizer that creates fog depends on the water level and the fog generation process obviously uses water and make the water level decrease. The incoming water mass rate is hence not constant and the method we use to estimate its value is not accurate for large duration measurements.

My Fab Academy final project goal is to solve this problem with two different methods :

Make the incoming water mass rate more constant
Have a direct measurement of the incoming fog water mass rate

It divides my final project in two parts :

Water Level Control
Fog Density Measurment