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
400% efficiency is good, but it's not better than the ∞% efficiency you get from something that doesn't require fuel input to begin with. (I'm pretty sure the Technology Connections guy would agree on that point.)
If nothing else, think of it this way: even if you still want to use air conditioning to make sure you get all the way down to comfortable room temperature or whatever your target is (which a Qanat, although able to achieve a >15°C ΔT, might or might not be able to do reliably), it'll still give you a big head start and greatly reduce the amount of energy needed. It's a lot like using a ground-source heat pump instead of an air-source one. What's not to like‽
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
Obviously, you use the tech in the situations it's appropriate for. If your office building happens to be in Phoenix, AZ, then a qanat might be a pretty good idea!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zW9_ztTiw8 Have you seen this? Seems like the next big thing in AC is just around the corner :-)
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.
I would not explode, it would implode.
Styrofoam is good enough for that.
Not really mentioned in the picture but Qanats are basically underground aquaducts, bringing water from nearby mountains to the cities. They can be up to 70km long. We went into one when I visited Iran.
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
I cant speak to other parts of the U.S. but where I am from, people would design their farm houses so that when you opened all the windows, the natural wind direction wanted to blow through your house and naturally "cool" it. Coming from a house with AC, it seemed like a shit system lol, but i guess compared to being roasted in your stuffy house, it was probably pretty nice
Frankly, ceasing to design homes and factories that way was a mistake. Stack effect ventilation is no less of an important part of green building technology today than it ever was.
Not quite an air conditioner, but it seems modernizing it could be a great idea for new constructions to save on power. Maybe as a supplement to Air Conditioners.
Not quite an air conditioner, but it seems modernizing it could be a great idea for new constructions to save on power. Maybe as a supplement to Air Conditioners.
It's called "radiant floor cooling/heating" and this has existed for a while.
A radiant floor is just a heat transfer system that still needs a hot/cold source. Evaporative coolers (aka swamp coolers) are really the modern day equivalent.
Maybe as a supplement to Air Conditioners.
Swamp coolers only work when the outdoor air is quite dry (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico). The resulting indoor air is very humid. Swamp coolers cannot make a big difference in temp. In NM they are perfect because the air is dry (too dry for comfort, IMO) and you only need to lower the temp by a small amount. So the resulting indoor air quality in NM is perhaps the best in the world for those who like ~65—70% humidity. A lot of swamp coolers in AZ have been replaced with A/C because the city temps have increased¹ to a point where swamp coolers cannot make a sufficient temp decrease. So I wonder if an AZ residents kept their swamp coolers going & added A/C. Note that A/C dries the interior air, so I suspect the swamp cooler might actually be make the A/C work harder in that scenario. If anyone knows something concrete about this I’d be interested in hearing it.
① One theory on the temp increase in AZ cities is simply more and more concrete covering the ground (roads, parking lots, driveways), less soil and vegetation. This means rainwater is drained off instead of having the large scale evaporative cooling effect of soil & vegetation absorbing water temporarily until it evaporates. IMO one correction (apart from reverting parking lots to gardens) is to get roofers installing vegetated rooftops. I really don’t understand why #vegetatedRooftops are nearly non-existent in the US. Pick any city and call every single roofing company in the region, and most likely not a single one of them can do #vegetatedRoofs.
Meanwhile, they can make ice with nearly identical technology...
those don't make ice, just insulates them really well. the ice froze outside at night.
passive house design
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.
I came across this exact thing when researching air conditioning. And since I was interested in a good soltution for the tropics these Yak'chals as they're called are basically useless. The tropics regularly have dew points of 26°C and above.
It can kinda work with an elaborate setup and a (liquid) desiccant cycle but in the end you still want the evaporation cooling outside, especially in the tropics where you have legionella practically instantly if you humidify anything indoors. And that will tank the efficiency. But it kinda works. The more humid the weather the hotter the regeneration of the desiccant has to be to work.Video 1 Experimental setup indoors to show the concept
Video 2 Solar setup outsideThe 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.
Thanks for pointing that out. My immediate thought upon reading the headline was how a/c could be implemented without electricity. I wondered if a compressor could be beast powered somehow. @[email protected] should correct the title.
Iran used to have AC. They still do, but they used to, too.
All-encompassingly!
I tought this was a meme and have been looking for Saddam Hussein's red sillouette for half a minute.
Wow, I thought quanat was a made-up word from dune.
If "Kwisatz Haderach" is also a real thing that would be weird.
It's derived from Hebrew.
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?
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.
The problem with that is it leaves little space for vegetation and soil, which give an outdoor evaporative cooling effect. The narrow streets approach should be combined with vegetated rooftops. An perhaps the vegetation should be able to thrive in the shade of solar panels.
I remember using something similar to that in college but if I recall correctly it was for weed
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'm always amazed by stuff like this that ancient peoples were able to work out on their own. Like how would they even figure any of this stuff out on their own? Obviously it had to be Aliens. /s
Herodotus made an estimate of the rate of growth of the Nile delta, and used those estimates to challenge some conventional thinking about history and to make some predictions about the future. The ancients had a wealth of knowledge and competency. Probably much of it is lost.
Humans have always been highly intelligent, they were just limited by the tools of their times. And yes much of their knowledge and innovation wasn't preserved to be built off of.
Probably, almost 100% definitely aliens, yes, I have to concur.
wait isnt a similar system in the great pyramid?
Can't really think of a way a tomb needs AC, but i'm eager to be proven wrong :-)
Nah man, you have to cool all the grain that was store in there.
Hadn't been invented yet.
WOW EPIC
I kind of want to try this myself
Seeing a lot of contrarians in this thread who just don't like that the Middle East had literally cool tech before America... pardon, before the people who stole America from the Americas, had literally cool tech.
Probs they are gonna call this thing "weapon of mass destruction" as a pretense for the next Yearly Oil Extraction invasion, conveniently ignoring that from an environmental perspective """modern""" AC is over twelve hundred times the WMD Iranian Air Conditioners ever were.
