F

our students from Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Yogyakarta, have created a device that can harvest water from fog, opening the possibility that during the dry season water will no longer be a problem, as long as there is fog.

'€œThere is always fog during the dry season. It'€™s part of the balance of nature,'€ leader of the student research team, Aditya Riski Taufani, said recently.

Aditya and his colleagues '€” Puji Utomo, Taufiq Ilham Maulana and Musofa '€” of UGM'€™s school of engineering, major in civil and environmental engineering. They started work on their project early this year.

Aditya said the idea for the research came when they visited a village on the Ungaran plateau during the dry season and saw that there was still plenty of fog in the morning. During one of their classes, they had been told that water can be harvested from fog, so they submitted a research proposal asking for funding to the Education and Culture Ministry'€™s Student Creativity Program.

Trials were conducted in Ngoho hamlet in Semarang, Central Java. Ngoho was chosen because every dry season wells dry up and a clean water crisis is a recurrent problem there. The area is rich in fog during the dry season, so it seemed the ideal spot decided to conduct their research.

Local people had tried to deal with the drought by digging artesian wells up to 200 meters deep but the yield was not sufficient to meet with their needs.

 Under the supervision of their professor Fatchan Nurrochmad and with Rp 9 million (US$930) in their pocket, they began experimenting on with different designs.

'€œThe technique is relatively simple,'€ Puji Utomo said.

The fog is collected manually in polypropylene nets with two supporting poles. Already water, the harvested fog is runs through a PVC pipe into a jerry-can.

A fog harvester can collect between 1.5 liters and three liters of water per day. Two collectors have been installed as a pilot project. '€œWe need evaluation for further development,'€ Aditya said.

The group does not yet know which design gives the maximum yield, likewise the calculation of how much water must be produced to meet with demand.

One thing they are sure of is that if the machine is produced en masse, it will be able to a least partially solve the problem of water shortages during dry season, and could be a solution for droughts across the country if the government has the commitment to develop it.

The team is now designing a bigger device. '€œWe are developing technology to inhale fog so we don'€™t need to do manually using nets,'€ Puji said.