New solar water coolers may sharply lower the cost of industrial-scale air conditioning and refrigeration. The new water coolers are panels that sit atop a roof, and they’re made of three components.
1. a plastic layer topped with a silver coating that reflects nearly all incoming sunlight, keeping the panel from heating up in the summer sun.
2. The plastic layer sits atop the second component, a snaking copper tube. Water is piped through the tube, where it sheds heat to the plastic. That heat is then radiated out by the plastic at a wavelength in the middle region of the infrared (IR) spectrum, which is not absorbed by the atmosphere and instead travels all the way to outer space.
3. the whole panel is encased in a thermally insulating plastic housing that ensures nearly all the heat radiated away comes from the circulating water and not the surrounding air.
Stanford researchers placed three water cooling panels—each 0.37 square meters—atop a building on campus and circulated water through them at a rate of 0.2 liters every minute. They report today in Nature Energy that their setup cooled the water as much as 5°C below the ambient temperature over 3 days of testing. They then modeled how their panels would behave if integrated into a typical air conditioning unit for a two-story building in Las Vegas, Nevada. The results: Their setup would lower the building’s air conditioning electrical demand by 21% over the summer.
Ronggui Yang, a mechanical engineer at the University of Colorado in Boulder, earlier this year reported the development of a plastic film that cools everything it touches up to 10°C. Because the plastic IR-emitting materials are commercially available in large quantities, it shows that the technology has the potential to be scaled up, Yang says. “It shows a promising direction for real world use.”
Aaswath Raman, a physicist and member of the Stanford team, says that since conducting this initial experiment, he and his colleagues formed a startup company called SkyCool Systems in Burlingame, California, to commercialize the technology. The company has scaled up the panels to 1.65 square meters each, and is now conducting a larger field trial in Davis, California.
Abstract
Cooling systems consume 15% of electricity generated globally and account for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. With demand for cooling expected to grow tenfold by 2050, improving the efficiency of cooling systems is a critical part of the twenty-first-century energy challenge. Building upon recent demonstrations of daytime radiative sky cooling, here we demonstrate fluid cooling panels that harness radiative sky cooling to cool fluids below the air temperature with zero evaporative losses, and use almost no electricity. Over three days of testing, we show that the panels cool water up to 5 ∘C below the ambient air temperature at water flow rates of 0.2 l min−1 m−2, corresponding to an effective heat rejection flux of up to 70 W m−2. We further show through modeling that, when integrated on the condenser side of the cooling system of a two-story office building in a hot dry climate (Las Vegas, USA), electricity consumption for cooling during the summer could be reduced by 21% (14.3 MWh).
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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