This isn’t just mildly interesting. We should be considering methods of air cooling that do not use any carbon in order to avoid aircon usage becoming a contributor to the climate problem as things get hotter and hotter.
I agree with you that we should be exploring alternatives, but aircon is extremely energy efficient for how much thermal energy it moves (reaching 400% efficiency in some cases) . The problem isn’t aircon itself, but what is being used to power it (coal/natural gas power plants)
In fact the technology behind aircon can be expanded into a heat pump to both heat and cool, being more efficient than electro-resistive or gas heating. There’s even water heaters that will actually cool the area they’re in and use the heat they gather from the space to heat the water.
Technology Connections has a great series of videos that go in depth on both heat pumps and aircon.
Yeah, “air conditioning powered by solar/wind/hydro” can feel like it’s one big Rube Goldberg machine to make air cool, but the reality is that it comes together to make something that can scale really easily. I can’t imagine coming up with a design like what’s in OP for an apartment complex or condo building.
Source: just made it up, but also a Technology Connections fan. All that’s to say, feel free to correct me with a little data
I had a crazy thought. What if you used depressurization to cool interiors?
Not as in depressurize the room and potentially kill the people inside, but in a way similar to soundproofing where you create an airtight gap in your walls, depressurize it to create a partial vacuum and effectively restrict both heat and sound transfer. That way it would be much easier to control internal temperature.
The only two problems I can see with it is expense (pumping air out of the gaps between your walls could be pricey), and the potential of explosive repressurization if something were to break the wall.
Wall isolation is pretty fine as it is, main weaknesses are windows and thermal bridging.
We still have the issue that a perfectly isolated house will need to lose the heat created by humans and electric systems, so actual cooling is required.
And how do you get fresh air in? Also the problem of heat transfer is never by gaps in the walls, at least not for buildings in western and central Europe. The problem is heat conduction through the window panes. And that is with isolated windows already. Also it is impossible to get a brick wall air tight. Leave alone you create a great environment for water to leak in and damage everything.
A building needs to be able to “breathe” in order to get rid of the humidity that is generated inside.
This would be a great idea if you want everyone in that building to file humidity complaints every single day. Air conditioners work by using mechanical work (compressor) to exploit evaporation in order to pull heat from one location to another and exhaust it away, in turn cooling the first location (this could be air, water, etc.)
This system works by using ground temp water as a heatsink to suck heat out of the air passing over it. When it does this, it humidifies the air. In the desert…who cares? In an office building…who cares? Every single worker who is stuck there all day
If you’re saying we need better systems than the AC unit you grew up with, fear not! Many office buildings have been moving away from it (same with other large venues) they use a chilled water system. They use the best of both these systems to get WAY more performance out of way less wattage. You only need a fraction of the cooling power with a chilled water system because the water can absorb much more heat per unit mass than air and can be sized to never run during the day, but only at night when the grid is least in use
AC unit you grew up with
Lmao grew up with? Most of us have never used AC at all in europe. Here in the UK no homes have AC. The issue is that people are installing it now because of climate change and the result is massively higher energy use.
Not necessarily in your house. I’m talking about the design of the units from when you were a child (Many public buildings in the EU have AC regardless of houses not having it). AC was invented in 1901, and has come a very long way since then, and we have begun combining it with old principles to extract the best of both solutions
Combining modern refrigeration/cooling techniques with well designed passive systems that exploit material properties (Heat capacities, transfer coefficients, etc.) to their advantage is the future of HVAC. It started with CFCs and knowing we could exploit their boiling point with mechanical force to chill air beyond the outside air temperature. Who knows where science and engineering may take us next!
Cooling a ware house, lecture hall or mall is very different from cooling an apaprtement building. In particular because most of the former have been designed with AC in mind.
Who knows where science and engineering may take us next!
Not beyond the hard limits of physics. You are not going to retrofit an appartement building built in 1900 or 1970 or 2000 for that matter with an efficent heating/cooling system without major rebuilding.
I love passive systems. The more passive the better.
Lotta old Victorian homes and factories from that Era did the same thing (without water obviously just a big tower to catch the wind). More like an attic fan than an AC in those cases, still a pretty clever way to move air without electricity. Always impressed by how clever people were back in the old times
Ancient Iran had swamp coolers* to be more accurate here.
This works in the desert, but you can’t replicate it in a humid climate like you can with AC.
The very term Air Conditioning refers to a technical system, that is deliberately influencing aka conditioning the properties of the air.
So yes, this is an ancient AC system.
Cool, but that’s not what we mean when we say AC. The meanings of words change over time and AC is used almost exclusively to refer to a specific type of device so unambiguous that I don’t usually have to explain which exact type of device I mean.
Otherwise literally just putting up a fan next to your window is technically AC. The term AC will lose all meaning.
The specific device that mostly works by fanning in air that is cooled by using evaporation? Seems very similiar to what the ancient people there had.
I was told that the houses in trinidad, Cuba have a similar cooling effect. Also the round white houses in tunesia have a cooling effect. Any tunesian or Cubans here?
I think that the Eastgate Mall in Zimbabwe makes usage of a similar principle, but their inspiration came from Termite Mounds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP8DSdfoiZw
I gotta wonder if the same was true for them to.
Yes, humans often eat upwards of 15% sawdust in processed foods.
Read the ingredients, where do you think cellulose comes from?
This looks like some other things I have heard of before.
Makes me wonder how many ancient desert cultures designed ways to cool the air in their structures.
One othe trick was to build houses close to each other with narrow streets between them, so they would be in the shade of buildings most of the time. This way the city can actually be cooler than the open area around it.
Of course this won’t work anymore with large modern glass buildings or wide roads between them.
