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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
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.
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.
Almost like the fabric medium in current swamp coolers, except they can't be replaced because they are mortared in there, so everyone gets Legionnaire's Disease!
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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Agreed; this is definitely vaporware.
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