Acoustic Tweezer-Modulated Biomimetic Patterned Particle-Polymer Composite for Water Vapor Harvesting

With the recent threat of climate change and global warming, ensuring access to safe drinking water is a great challenge in many areas worldwide. Designing functional materials for capturing water from natural resources like fog and mist has become one of the key research areas to maximize the production of clean water. From this aspect, nature is a great source for designing bioinspired functional materials as some of the plant leaves and animal exoskeletons can harness water and then store it to save themselves from arid, xeric conditions. Inspired by the Stenocara beetle, we have designed a composite surface structure with periodic islands made of aluminum microparticles surrounded by poly(dimethylenesiloxane) (PDMS). An acoustic tweezer-based method was used to fabricate the bioinspired composite structures, where surface acoustic waves at specific frequencies and amplitudes are applied to align the microparticles as islands in the polymer matrix. An oxygen plasma etching step was applied to expose the microparticles on the PDMS surface. The average water harvesting efficiencies for structures made with 120 and 80 kHz acoustic frequencies and 1 hour etching time were found to be 9.41 and 8.84 g cm-2 h-1, respectively. The acoustically patterned biomimetic composite surface showed higher water harvesting efficiency compared with completely hydrophobic PDMS and hydrophilic aluminum surfaces, demonstrating the advantages of the bioinspired composite material design and acoustic-assisted manufacturing technique. The biomimetic fog water harvesting material is a promising avenue to fulfill the demand for a cost-effective, sustainable, and energy-efficient solution to safe drinking water.