Air conditioning is one of those things that gets fought over in the office during the summer as there are always those that are too cold or too hot. It is now winter and hopefully the fights have cooled down along with the temperature (pardon the pun), however this doesn’t mean that you can forget about your system. With this in mind and the importance climate change coming to the forefront of conversations a team of researchers have revealed that they have found a way to cool a room without increasing demands in time for next summer.
The team that have come up with this new system have said that in the USA alone, 15 per cent of the energy used in buildings is spent running air conditioning systems. As it is likely that air conditioning systems are only run during the summer months this seems like a reasonable percentage however, there is a huge amount of electricity generated from coal based power plants which in turn creates a lot of carbon emissions.
With this in mind the team created a way of cooling the home that doesn’t increase energy demands and the study was published in the journal, Nature. Here it explained that the new systems allows buildings to get rid of heat without using compressors or pumps and instead just radiate it back into space using thermal photonics.
Eli Yablonovitch is an engineer and pioneer of photonics he has said, “This is very novel and an extraordinarily simple idea. As a result of professor Fan’s work, we can now (use radiative cooling), not only at night but counter-intuitively in the daytime as well.”
According to the team of researchers it works by pulling infrared radiation from it which is the same radiation that you can feel when you walk past an oven.
Raman is another of the engineers working on the project and he has said, “We’ve created something that’s a radiator that also happens to be an excellent mirror.
“Every object that produces heat has to dump that heat into a heat sink. What we’ve done is to create a way that should allow us to use the coldness of the Universe as a heat sink during the day.”
The initial tests have shown that this technique can make the room up to nine degrees cooler however, we are sceptical as to how long, if ever, this new system will take to implement into buildings as there are millions that currently use the air conditioning systems that we are used to seeing.
Air conditioning is one of those things that gets fought over in the office during the summer as there are always those that are too cold or too hot. It is now winter and hopefully the fights have cooled down along with the temperature (pardon the pun), however this doesn’t mean that you can forget about your system. With this in mind and the importance climate change coming to the forefront of conversations a team of researchers have revealed that they have found a way to cool a room without increasing demands in time for next summer.
The team that have come up with this new system have said that in the USA alone, 15 per cent of the energy used in buildings is spent running air conditioning systems. As it is likely that air conditioning systems are only run during the summer months this seems like a reasonable percentage however, there is a huge amount of electricity generated from coal based power plants which in turn creates a lot of carbon emissions.
With this in mind the team created a way of cooling the home that doesn’t increase energy demands and the study was published in the journal, Nature. Here it explained that the new systems allows buildings to get rid of heat without using compressors or pumps and instead just radiate it back into space using thermal photonics.
Eli Yablonovitch is an engineer and pioneer of photonics he has said, “This is very novel and an extraordinarily simple idea. As a result of professor Fan’s work, we can now (use radiative cooling), not only at night but counter-intuitively in the daytime as well.”
According to the team of researchers it works by pulling infrared radiation from it which is the same radiation that you can feel when you walk past an oven.
Raman is another of the engineers working on the project and he has said, “We’ve created something that’s a radiator that also happens to be an excellent mirror.
“Every object that produces heat has to dump that heat into a heat sink. What we’ve done is to create a way that should allow us to use the coldness of the Universe as a heat sink during the day.”
The initial tests have shown that this technique can make the room up to nine degrees cooler however, we are sceptical as to how long, if ever, this new system will take to implement into buildings as there are millions that currently use the air conditioning systems that we are used to seeing.
Photo by Pixabay