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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.
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
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.
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Here in the philippines, water is often kept cool by storing it in porus pots, the water slowly seeps through the walls of the clay pot, and evaporates from the outside, there are no channels as its using the micro pore structure of the earthen ceramic pot. The evaporation lowers the temperature of the whole pot.
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?
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Really it's just swamp cooler media. The only thing that makes swamp cooling viable is high CFM airflow. I lived with evaporative cooling only (no refrigerated a/c) for 25 years and a small house needs at least a 3000 CFM squirrel cage fan encased in a frame of three or four water soaked paper lattice or Excelsior wood fiber pads providing the moisture. The biggest problem is cooling media degradation due to calcification from hard water. As the water evaporates it leaves minerals behind. Some minerals do get suspended in the air, making a fine white dust, but most of the "lime" rinses through the media and is collected by a pump that runs it through the media again. The water becomes supersaturated in a day and dumps the precipitate on the media as the water evaporates and the temperature of the pad drops. Pumps with a "purge cycle" mitigate the issue somewhat but the media (and pump, and tubing) still becomes plugged and brittle in at most two seasons. Do you print a new wall at that point, or use purified water from the start? A new wood fiber pad is under four bucks (google "swamp cooler pads"), so I don't see how printing media is going to be useful. Passive cooling with wind power is right out, if the air is not moving fast enough it just warms up and then you have heat and humidity.
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From my days working in the dry portions of Colorado in the summers, exactly this.Swamp Coolers have been used forever and are a godsend in the 100+ parts of summer.
It's a dry heat sure, but thats why swamp coolers work there.
All this seems to be doing is optimizing the concept instead of just having giant slats paddlewheeling in a tank.
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Do they really need so much water for golf courses in the desert? Yet they exist in Yuma. The problem is the very rich using any amount of water for whatever they want. Also lack of business investment in more basic research in solar desalination, for example. The market wants to eliminate free lunches because they're bad for business.