On the other hand, after reading the notes on the aerosols generated acoustically, I thought this was a great way to grow nutritious red-skinned marble potatoes that have a high specific surface area, without using much real estate to do it.
While mulling it over, I remembered that fifty years ago I was engaged in designing and making erosion-resistant sonic nozzles for the paper-making industry to recover the sulfites from the mill liquor by evaporating the water from it.
I hot-pressed silicon carbide rings in graphite molds at about 2000 degC, then subsequently milled the ring ultrasonically with boron nitride slurry and sacrificial Hastelloy tool tips (B4N grit is harder even than diamond paste). This formed the chamber which under high pressure flow developed cavitation in the gas and hence dispersion into droplets of the liquor injected into the flow.
These fabricated rings were then mounted in 430 Ti-stabilized stainless steel enveloping rings by heating the assembly of nested rings to fuse the glass frit powder placed between the outer SiC wall and the inner stainless ring wall, such that on cooling, the differential shrinkage brought the brittle carbide ring under such compression that it was impossible to break it under normal pressure generated by the ultrasonic generation while in use, and extremely resistant to chemical corrosion or solids wear by the hot sulfite liquor being dispersed by the nozzle (I hope this makes sense to you).
I don't see how the inkjet-activated mist generating orfice can remained unclogged and/or unworn in the kind of application and in the kind of volumes this article describes.
The dust bowl during the Great Depression was probably due more to a combination of financial, social and climatic problems (very frequent drought) rather than to the depletion of soils. Because if it’s due to the latter, it should have happened also in other parts of the world where there are much more population densities and intensive agriculture than in the US.
Soil depletion is one of the preferred myths of greenies, but like anything from them, it’s a dead wrong misconception. There is a simple index that demonstrates it is bunk : productivity per acre, which has increased year after year for decades, for each and every big crops (corn, wheat, potatoes). Even better (or worse for the malthusians’ lie), productivity per unit mass of fertilizer has also increased, showing that not only farmers are more skilled (not a scoop) but that soils are improving not depleted (by producing more per unit mass of fertilizer, but the atmospheric CO2 fertilization factor plays a big part too).
Your know-how in precision mechanics and materials is fascinating. I have zero doubt about your assessment of their mist generator wearing out.