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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 05 2017, @12:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-it-cool-my-beer? dept.

New water-cooling solar panels could lower the cost of air conditioning by 20%

Most of us have heard of solar water heaters. Now there's a solar water cooler, and the technology 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. The first is a plastic layer topped with a silver coating that reflects nearly all incoming sunlight, keeping the panel from heating up in the summer sun. 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. Finally, 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.

Researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, recently 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 [DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.143] [DX]. 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.


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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:47PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:47PM (#563891) Journal

    [1] Bonus points for having asymmetric slopes;

    Some people live at a latitude of 45 degrees.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Touché=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Touché' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday September 05 2017, @09:29PM

    by Zinho (759) on Tuesday September 05 2017, @09:29PM (#563932)

    [1] Bonus points for having asymmetric slopes;

    Some people live at a latitude of 45 degrees.

    Nice, that earned a "touché" mod from me. Well played.

    I'd have no objection to people living at 45 degrees north or south of the equator having symmetrical front/back 45 degree roof slopes.

    [aside]/Zinho looks up which locations lie on the 45th parallels[/slope]

    Looks like New Zealand, Argentina, and Chile are the winners in the south. In the north it's France, Italy, several former Yugoslavian states, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, Mongolia, Japan, and the US States between Oregon and the northern border of Vermont. It would be an interesting exercise to build an Earthship up there and see the reaction it would draw on the permie message boards if I bought pre-fab trusses for its construction. :P

    --
    "Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin