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The "Cool Brick" Can Cool Off an Entire Room Using Nothing But Water
ErnieKey writes Emerging Objects, a company which experiments with 3D printing technology, has created what they call the "Cool Brick." Using basic concepts of evaporation, it holds water like a sponge, takes in hot dry air and converts it into cool moist air. 3D-printed with a specially engineered lattice using ceramics, it can be formed into entire walls which could be placed in different rooms of a house or building, thus replacing the need for air conditioning in hot, dry climates such as deserts.
*cough* bullshit *cough* 3d printed *cough* magic *cough cough*
The last thing you want to have done in a desert is have water evaporate away.
where water tends to be in short supply than energy, e.g., sunlight.
There is a chart which shows the optimal temperature for an office is around 23'C (Google "HVAC comfort chart"), this is the temperature which has the widest acceptable range for humidity that people find comfortable.
Evaporative cooling brings the air temperature down by increasing the humidity of the air. The issue is that to achieve sufficient cooling the humidity increases beyond the comfort zone without bringing the temperature down sufficiently.
What would be interesting is a two stage evaporative cooling that does not require mechanical assistance. In a two stage system the first stage provides net cooling without humidifying the air used by the second stage. It results in cooler air with less humidity.
ZombieEngineer
...for your walls to start leaking and your electronics to start rusting. That and a large water bill for your bone-dry desert residence.
evaporative humidifiers work great until they start breeding molds and algae. The water channels need to be cleaned and the screens replaced. The screen in this case being a wall in the house.
I wonder if this system would be susceptible to mold growth...
I lived in an apartment which had a swamp cooler and no air conditioning. Even in the dry air of suburban Los Angeles, it sucked. It required moving massive amounts of air, which meant constant noise. It meant interior doors – and exterior windows – had to be left open.
I suppose it's better than nothing, but so is a fan and a wet towel.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
They had these during the Vietnam war...called "chill boxes." All you had to do was add water to it and it would start to pump out cool air.
I want a wall that removes cool, wet air from the room and replaces it with dry, warm air so that I can dry laundry indoors in winter without covering my house in condensation and mold.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Isn't water kinda expensive in deserts?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Add that to areas that already have a high humidity and this thing is useless. Then you don't need a 3d printed brick, you can soak a towel let it dry for the same effect.
My apartment doesnt have air conditioning. So all I need to do is buy some of these cool bricks and put one in each room of my home? By how many degrees will that lower the temp? If I buy more will it make my place freezing cold? Can you disable the cooling function in the winter?
So it's 3D printed. I'm not seeing how it's superior to any previous evaporative cooling approach.
There is an outfit I've read about that uses evaporation in adjacent tubes to produce a stream of cool, DRY air that you can send into a building. You can find them on YouTube if you search for "Coolerado".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"What would be interesting is a two stage evaporative cooling"
In datacenters this is called "water side economization". An evaporation plate like the one suggested is coupled to a water loop. No good unless you have a lot of water and no humidity, so basically just in the Northwest.
I am not an engineer (nor a zombie for that matter) so excuse me if I am wrong, but aren't you essentially describing how an AC unit works?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
...but there must be a problem with the design, since when I sent it to the 3D printer, it stopped working and it is now bricked showing no signs of life. That's not cool...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionnaires'_disease
Add that to areas that already have a high humidity and this thing is useless.
Many things are useless in different areas.
I live in Sweden, ask me how useful I find the AC that everyone living in southern California thinks of as a necessity.
I am not an engineer (nor a zombie for that matter) so excuse me if I am wrong, but aren't you essentially describing how an AC unit works?
No. An AC unit takes advantage of gas pressure laws. It compresses a gas, then allows it to expand. As the gas expands, its temperature drops. By wrapping all this up with a set of radiator coils and fan(s), you can pump heat from inside to outside. Along the way, the cooled air will drop any water vapor that exceeds the carrying capacity for that temperature.
So an AC requires a pump (which can be mechanical or a heat source) and air recirculators, and the net result is air that is both cooler and drier.
A swamp cooler is almost completely passive. It needs a mechanism to inject the water, and (preferably) something to help the water-laden air move, but instead of lowering room humidity, it raises it.
No, they are describing a good old-fashioned evaporative cooler. We used to call then swamp coolers. They are effective in arrid climates. They can cool the air a few degrees. They also add a little humidity to the air, which is nice in the desert. It would not work in a humid climate.
Now I'm curious. For the math/HVAC nerds among us, how much of a humidity increase are you looking at from evaporative cooling? Say 33C with 20% humidity to 23C as the OP lays out, what would the resulting humidity be?
Well.. maybe not useful in deserts, but in South Australia evaporative cooling is both popular and useful. Low average humidity in Summer, ready access to water - at least in the cities. So a system like this would work in South Australia - it'd probably be completely useless in other Australian States where the humidity in Summer is high. I'm guessing there are similar places to South Australia around the world though, so maybe there's also a market.
But evaporative cooling systems are so cheap to build and run, and easy to maintain, I wonder if a brick wall you can't control (other than the flow of water) makes sense. Perhaps using the material to replace the battens in evaporative systems makes sense - as these are the main parts that wear out over time.
the AC that everyone living in southern California thinks of as a necessity.
Interesting fact about Southern California is that the ocean currents come down from Alaska. So the water is cold. But if you live within a few miles of the coast then you don't need AC. And, in fact, most apartments near the coast don't have AC. They do often have little heaters for when it gets chilly in the winter.
No, they are describing a good old-fashioned evaporative cooler. We used to call then swamp coolers.
Also no. The GP is describing a good old-fashioned evaporative cooler coupled to an air to air heat exchanger. The reason we don't do what they suggest is that it takes up a lot of space.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now I'm curious. For the math/HVAC nerds among us, how much of a humidity increase are you looking at from evaporative cooling?
I'm not a Math/HVAC nerd, despite getting an ASE certification in automotive HVAC, you don't actually need to know much of anything to get one, keep that in mind next time you go to get your car serviced by an ASE-certified repairman, all their certs are shit like that and their "master" certs just prove that you have a bunch of their worthless lower certs. But anyway, I've lived with a swamp cooler, and I'll never understand how all those people can swaddle themselves in cloth in the desert because on hot days I had to be naked (or nearly so) and literally in the path of airflow from the cooler to be even vaguely comfortable. They also don't work worth a crap if the humidity is over 25%, so they really only work properly in deserts or places working hard on becoming deserts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is an outfit I've read about that uses evaporation in adjacent tubes to produce a stream of cool, DRY air that you can send into a building. You can find them on YouTube if you search for "Coolerado".
An evaporative cooler followed by an air to air heat exchanger is not a revolutionary idea. It's not even a bad idea, except that it only works on dry days and it takes up an awful lot of space.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Two problems.
First, the problem that every evaporative cooler has: water is scarce in the hot dry places where evaporative cooling works well.
Second, water always has some minerals dissolved in it that crystallize out when you remove the water. A traditional swamp cooler has an active flow and a reservoir that you have to empty to keep these from building up, but with these "smart bricks", the pores in the bricks are going to fill up with lime and gypsum, and pretty soon they'll be "dumb bricks".
you can replace the wood wool easily when it gets yucky. You may have an expensive problem with this "cool brick".
Algae, fungie and who knows what else can grow when germs/spores in air get blown into moist and porous material and start growing there creating a stink.
Unless this "cool brick" has some antibacterial properties, stuff will grow. And if one wants constantly present antibiotics around in a living environment is questionable.
I wonder how this should work. Has this been tested for a longer period?
Converts nice dry, but hot air into moist but cool air. Then that moist cool air circulates and gets warm then you get a room full of hot moist air and the evaporator cooler stops working because the air is saturated. So over time it converts a livable room in which you can sweat and cool yourself into a hot moist room where sweating is impossible.
Short term gain, long term pain.
Oh, and by the way - do you know what the gas is that is responsible for 95% of Global Warming? No, not CO2. Water Vapour. I wonder why no one has called for this invention to be banned out of hand...?
First, most water vapor in the atmosphere comes from natural sources. Unless you're planning on eliminating oceans, lakes, rivers, swamps, wetlands and rain (and thus killing all life on earth), the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere isn't going to change.
Second, Water vapor condenses and precipitates out of the atmosphere naturally, so it doesn't build up beyond the levels that are already there It's not a problem. CO2, on the other hand, does not condense and precipitate out of the atmosphere naturally (unless you drop the earth's temperature to -147ÂC, that is, which would kill almost all life on earth and leaving it for the tardigrades to inherit). It does build up and it is a problem.
My concern would be the exact opposite happening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionnaires'_disease
Just because some americans use the perjorative term of swamp cooler doesnt mean these things arent effective in the right climate. Where i live it gets to 40c and the delta T (theoretical maximum temp drop from a so called swamp cooler) is usually around 15 degrees which means with the correctly sized unit for my house it drops the temp inside down to 25c or so which is just perfect. It also costs cents per day to run vs the much larger cost of running my regfrigerative unit. Which in my climate is only required maybe 4 or 5 days of the year.
In most areas the water contains dissolved minerals. These like to deposit themselves where the water evaporates, just check your nearest filter-based humidifier, it's all crunchy. So unless you can run distilled water through your wall eventually your wall will be plugged. Then you'll have to soak it with lime-away.
With the 3,300 year old system you could just replace the jar when it got crusty.
In the hot dry climate, esp. a desert, you might not want to piss away your water cooling the (uninsulated) tent.
You might be able to find a better use for the rare and life-supporting resource.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
One step closer to an uncomfortable truth.
Because water is what you have a lot of in a "hot dry desert". Though I guess once people start dropping from Legionnaire's there'll be more water to go around those that are left.
Just because some americans use the perjorative term of swamp cooler doesnt mean these things arent effective in the right climate.
It's not that they don't work, it's that the resulting air is humid as hell. If you live someplace where the house cooks all year then good on you, but if you live someplace with a wet winter then a swamp cooler is a miserable thing because it will drive moisture into everything which will then rot and/or mold.
It also costs cents per day to run vs the much larger cost of running my regfrigerative unit.
This is certainly the reason why we still use them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which works fine, but use water which is a problem in the desert.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This is Legionnaires disease waiting to happen.
If the Stanley tool people marketed it would it be Stanley Cool Brick?
Get it? Ahh screw it. Get off my lawn!
I refuse to sign
Termites have been successfully farming arid land using this technology for longer than humans have been on this planet. The high humidity climate is a benefit to the termites since termite farms grow a specific species of mold for food. The mold apparently evolved from a tropical species but is now totally dependent on termite climate control technology. The mounds themselves are built using technology similar to a 3D printer with 20 million print heads. They use spit and mud rather than hot plastic but the basic idea is the same.
I have termites on the brain since I recently visited the Kimberley in NW Australia, to say this termite technology has been successful is an understatement. The mounds are more closely packed than the apartments in the inner suburbs of Sydney, I'm not sure how far they stretch but I drove from Broome to Fitzroy crossing and they didn't thin out. Also note that the entire Kimberley region is under 2 meters of water in the wet season, the few people that live there survive the wet with tin boats to get between buildings on stilts or one of the few islands of high ground, not sure how termites survive the annual flood?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The article says that the creators of this envision it as a structural element of buildings. Where you would have an entire wall made of this material that gets soaked with water to cool the space when it gets hot. I have not dealt with a swamp coolers but I have dealt with humidifiers quite a lot. The one thing that I have observed is that every part that gets wet grows a colony of who knows what pretty fast if it isn’t regularly cleaned. In a lot of systems you have a pad, which is frequently structured very similarly to this material, which has to be replaced because there is no real way to clean the interior surfaces. Well with this stuff they are talking about taking that pad and making a permanent wall out of it. My prediction is that anybody who used this would end up with a huge mold filled science experiment in a fairly short time. The closest thing I can see to being able to really clean that would be to periodically saturate the wall with some sort of chemical cleaner. I could see these printed ceramic structures being used to make swamp coolers, and humidifiers, more efficient but use outlined in the article just seems like a bad idea.
Obviously in hot dry desert like climates water is at a premium so this is great how?
It is (or was) quite a common form of small building air conditioning plant not too long ago. I have come across a number of buildings in universities that uses such air conditioning plants. It is a cost effective (cheap energy wise) means of air-conditioning. The only downsides are:
1. Large and limited cooling capacity. One of the buildings I worked in had its evaporative air conditional converted to refrigerant type to increase capacity.
2. Possibility of Legionaires disease if the water is not kept clean.
If you want to find one, just listen for the sounds of water continually splashing near the plant room.
This would be great for deserts, because everyone knows that water is in abundant supply in desert environments.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
> Using basic concepts of evaporation, it holds water like a sponge, takes in hot dry air and converts it into cool moist air.
If only there was something already in existence that could do this. Like, say, a *sponge*.
which really will not work in areas that experience a monsoon season during the summer seasons. For example in Arizona the monsoon season starts beginning of July and last through September. The monsoon (not a weather service term for you purists) is typically when the dew point is at 55 degrees for 3 days. Guess when a swamp cooler looses effectiveness? When the wet bulb is at 55 degrees. So it is only useful during 2 months of the year in the U.S. desert souhwest.
A swamp cooler is cool because it cools the air, making it cooler. 3D printed stuff is cool, so a cool 3D printed cooler is a cooler cooler, making the room cooler.
Someone told me they did this in places with alabaster containers. The alabaster is porous enough to let the water evaporate through it. I have a better idea, stop living in the desert.
You might want to google "adaptive comfort."
Comfort is a function of temperature, humidity, air movement, radiant temperatures, clothing, and metabolism. There are a fair number of variables to play with, enthalpy is just the easiest to look at.
The other interesting thing about deserts is monsoons. Swamp coolers don't do much good then.
Which reminds me of an odd thing about bison in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. That is to say, New York bison whom New York bison bully themselves bully New York bison.
Of course this needs to run on deionized water, and I certainly do hope that they have a robust, validated mold and fungus control solution for this thing.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
"thus replacing the need for air conditioning in hot, dry climates such as deserts"
so instead of aircon from cheap electricity from an oil rich nation, instead water from A FUCKING DESERT!
much better use of resources there
An evaporative cooler followed by an air to air heat exchanger is not a revolutionary idea.
There's a bit more to it than that. It's worth looking them up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Used to help out at an old church in San Antonio. Basement was cooled by an AC unit or two, but mostly by being below-ground, but the sanctuary with it's 30 foot ceilings was cooled by a swamp cooler. Worked quite well since the whole place would dry out during the week by virtue of it being San Antonio, and you could cool it off in short order for cheap for those few hours when you had people in the sanctuary. I shudder to think what the AC bills would have been had we used regular AC for the whole place.
Here in sunny Texas, people have been using evaporative coolers for a very long time before modern A/C's came along. 100 years ago and more, people would put a bale of wet straw in front of a window and force air through it with a fan. We call them "Swamp Coolers" - not because they cool swamps - but because your home feels like a swamp when they are running.
That said, they do work fairly well in very low humidity places. Their big problems are:
1) They don't work worth a damn as the ambient humidity increases.
2) They humidify the air to the max - and people tend to get condensation and mold problems in their homes because of them.
3) When the temperatures go up, you feel more comfortable in low humidity than in high...so while they are generally able to reduce the temperature, you may not feel any more comfortable.
4) Sweating doesn't work as well in humid air - so these things really do have to get the temperature down well below where you'd need to sweat - and they aren't always that good.
There is a reason that freon-based air-conditioning was so revolutionary to people in the southern USA...it enabled people to live here more comfortably - despite the fact that evaporative coolers were cheaper and easily available.
-- Steve
So, cool your home in the desert with water. Even if it somehow works, water... In the desert... I would think that would be a bit more expensive than throwing in a solar panel and an air conditioner over time..
There are two main types of air-conditioner, the most common type of ac unit works like your fridge, it has a compressor, the gas is compressed outside the fridge, compression heats it up and it is cooled back down to room temperature by the radiator at the back, the gas is then allowed to expand again inside the fridge, the drop in pressure causes the gas to re-absorb the heat lost in the external radiator. Metaphorically the heat is "pumped out" of the fridge.
OTOH an evaporative cooler works because the water changes state from a liquid to a gas, the state change itself absorbs energy from the surrounding environment resulting in a temperature drop. The problem with EC is that the air quickly becomes supersaturated with water vapour and both the EC and your sweat will stop cooling you, at this point you need to empty the humid air from the room and replace it with hot dry air from outside. or alternatively, die from heat exhaustion.
As the GP indicated, a large damp towel will do the same thing as a high tech, overpriced, 3D printed nano-scale heat sponge. As an old fart Aussie who's seen more than 50 summers I can tell you from experience that the damp towel is very effective if you hang it over a $20 room fan and put it near a shaded window opened just enough to keep the room ventilated. Tall sliding windows are the best since the fan pulls in hot dry air at the bottom and cools it down on the way in. Hot air that tends to accumulate near the ceiling is pushed out at the top of the window
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
there's a reason this 3000 year old technology was abandoned when a/c became cheap enough.
lose != loose
It's called a swamp cooler and apart from being printed in a 3D printer there is NOTHING new to see here.
What's next? You going to 3D print a gun? Oh wait... Already done..
3D print joint replacements? That doo.
3D print...
What's next, make it available for people who want to pay in BitCoin?
What passes as advanced technology sometimes amazes me...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Agreed; this is definitely vaporware.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"Because the air in dessert environments is so hot and dry..."
Slow news day, huh?
3D-printed tardigrades: http://www.shapeways.com/product/SLS5DK33Z/tardigrade-water-bear
And you'll find exactly this thing, purchasable off-the-shelf, no 3-D printing needed....
mark
This is really nothing new, we have tons of swamp coolers that work on this principle in Colorado. The thing is you need a low humidity atmosphere for it to work to prevent humidity getting uncomfortably high and you need a plentiful water source because you're going to increase usage by several gallons per day per household in a zero percent humidity environment.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
This "cool brick" looks like a $5 humidifier pad with funky abstract patterns etched on the sides.
60% +/- assuming an adiabatic process at near 100% efficiency, and no heat gain in the space to conteract the sensible cooling.
I believe GP is proposing that you use a swamp cooler to chill one channel of outside air. Then run it past another channel of outside air via a heat exchanger. The net result would be outside air chilled by the same amount as the swamp cooler, but without the added humidity. In fact you could do this multiple times for extremely hot air (a swamp cooler will only lower the air temp by about 15-20 F, which if the outside temperature is 100+ F leaves the air at a still-uncomfortable 80+ F).
If you think that CO2, the biggest (only) building block for all living things, doesn't come out of the atmosphere naturally, then I have a bridge to sell you, you moron...
>Evaporative cooling brings the air temperature down by increasing the humidity of the air.
This statement is false. The air is cooled by the endothermic nature of evaporating of water. The humidity is a side effect.
Looks like somebody visited their mother to wash up their weekly laundry and watched it dry in a room.
But this is how commercial units work (and have for he last 50 years), so what is the new proposal?
must work for 3dprint.com as he only submits stories from them.. that or they are a DICE co.
What's pejorative about "swamp cooler"? It's just a heck of a lot easier to say in casual conversation then "evaporative cooler". Is calling that 4-wheel thing out in a parking spot a "car" worse than calling it an "automobile"?
The problem with a two-stage system is the dew point and the distinction between absolute and relative humidity. There are nice cool springs in northern Florida that pump out water at a brisk 72 degrees F. Jump in them and you will cool off rapidly. But they cannot cool anything below 72 F, and at 100% relative humidity that isn't pleasant. In a dry climate, you can use two-stage coolers to do all the work. In a wetter climate, you can use them to reduce the energy demand of regular air conditioners, but you still can't use them to do all the work of making pleasant indoor air. You have to cut the relative humidity somehow, and that requires lower temperatures.
Water is bad for electronics though. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...for a building block.
There is where the article lost me.
So say we all
I sure hope so, because what you said is "There is an outfit I've read about that uses evaporation in adjacent tubes to produce a stream of cool, DRY air that you can send into a building" and this is how air conditioning works, HTH. That's why the thing what cools the air is called the evaporator.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I spent one summer working in a factory in the Fresno desert. It used evaporative cooling to cool the plant.
I can tell you that there is a point where evaporative cooling fails and then the air just becomes hot and sticky.
You'd have to couple something like this with a dehumidifier.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
As a person who lives in one of these dry areas (Utah) I have an evaporative cooler along side my AC unit. Mold is not a big issue here but can be a problem. The bigger problem is that there are limits to what a cooler can do. If it's 120 degrees outside you won't be able to get it to feel like it's 70 inside. It can definitely make it comfortable but only to a point.
The other issue is that as your house becomes more humid it becomes less effective. You can't leave them running all the time or else you get a hot humid muggy house that feels like your walking through a swamp. That's why I use both a AC unit and the cooler. When it starts to get too hot or humid I kick on the AC. I save on power usage and get the best of both worlds.
All this being said, the idea of building a wall out of these with water running through it does not seem like a good idea. I hope they can make it work, but even if it does it won't be able to replace an air conditioner.
I was gonna say, looks like they basically reinvented the swamp cooler, tho this version is more versatile in terms of where you can locate it, and being amenable to more-portable units.
But as to monsoons, those don't affect all (or even most) deserts.
Having lived in the SoCal desert for 28 years, I can attest that monsoons there are a non-issue... we might get a little rain 10-15 days a year (some years we didn't hit 1 inch =total= precip), and our idea of 'humid' was 10%.
Tucson is another matter, they get the late-summer monsoons with full humidity.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Actually, a good swamp cooler will lower air temps by as much as 40 degrees, as I can attest from long experience in the desert (where our peak temp was +122F, but my house would stay under 80F despite a lack of insulation). The big tricks are to not move the air too fast -- you want to give it time to cool down before sending it to the target room -- and to keep the amount of water held in the pads fairly high (pads too clean or too dirty will both impair that).
And our natural humidity was so low that the air desperately needed all it could get.
But the concept of a heat exchanger sounds good to me, as swamp coolers are very inexpensive to run (the powered parts being just a tiny pump and a squirrel-cage fan). Whether a swamp cooler with heat exchanger would be more economical than a heat pump?
Dunno, swamp coolers are very low tech -- anyone can construct a passive swamp cooler using dripping water, moving air, and some burlap or other absorbant-but-porous material. (In fact I've done so as a temporary measure.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?