Cooling

"Garden and the Tower" is Atelier Thomas Pucher's winning design for the headquarters of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to be built in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The design is envisaged as "a global sign, made of light." The tower, very much the centerpiece of the design, will have a textile skin which, if we understand the design intent, will not only let sunlight and daylight in by day (an environmentally friendly way of illuminating the interior) but intentionally let artificial light out by night, to dramatic effect should the visualizations prove remotely accurate. The designers' approach to managing heat gain suggests that there's beauty in the function too.  Read More

When you have wet skin, you no doubt notice a cooling sensation as it dries. This is because the water droplets are carrying heat away from your skin with them, as they evaporate. Phase-change thermal diodes work the same way – through an evaporation and condensation process, they use liquid to transport heat away from things such as microchips. In most of these diodes, liquid placed on a hot surface evaporates, the vapor then rising onto a cooler surface, where it condenses back into liquid. In a closed-loop cycle, gravity subsequently carries that condensate back down to the hot surface, so it can once again be evaporated. Now, scientists from North Carolina's Duke University have discovered a method of getting condensed water droplets to jump back to the hot surface – and they can do so in any direction, including straight up.  Read More

Upon completion, Norway's Green Mountain Data Center will be the world's greenest server farm - according to its developers, at least. By piping cool water from a nearby fjord into the mountain halls that will house the server racks, its creators hope to eliminate the need for the power-hungry electric chillers that the sadly fjordless majority of the world's data centers require.  Read More

Chew on a stick of gum sweetened with xylitol and you may just experience a cool sensation. Slip on a pair of Carbon Pro Team shoes from Louis Garneau and you may just get the same feeling. While it's most common use is as a natural sweetener, properties of xylitol make it useful for clothing as well. Xylitol is woven into fabric under the brand name Ice-Fil, which is used in the insoles of the Louis Garneau Carbon Pro Team cycling shoes to help keep athletes cool.  Read More

Given that it typically gets hottest outside when the sunlight is most direct, it would make sense to have air conditioners that were powered by the thermal energy from solar rays. Unfortunately, collecting enough of that energy in a cost-effective manner can be challenging. Now, however, a team of University of California, Merced students have created a solar thermal collection system that is said to be significantly simpler, cheaper and more efficient than anything that’s come before.  Read More

While there are many options to cool a gaming desktop PC, mobile gamers might find it a little more difficult to implement additional fans to chill their gaming laptop monsters. Thermaltake has unveiled plans to expand its laptop cooling stand lineup by releasing the Massive 23 GT Cooler - a lightweight metal stand that packs an LED-illuminated 200mm fan and, unlike previous offerings, five different angles adjustment.  Read More

Silicon chips shuffling all those electrons around inside modern PCs, gaming consoles and home theater systems generate a lot of heat that needs to be dissipated to stop the machines going into meltdown and ruining your day. Fans are the most common form of cooling for modern electronic devices but they can generate a lot of noise that can leave your lounge room or study sounding like an airport runway. Sweden-based company RotoSub has developed an active noise control (ANC) system that is built into the fans themselves that promises to almost eliminate the fan’s mechanical noise and leave little more than the sound of the air blowing through the fan.  Read More

While some inventions originating in Japan can seem a little quirky by Western standards, many of those are at the same time rather innovative. This is certainly the case with the cooling foams and gels in spray-cans, which are cooling down Japanese city-dwellers this summer.  Read More

Automobiles, appliances, power plants, factories and electrical utilities all waste one thing: heat. More specifically, they produce heat as a by-product of their normal operations, but that heat is just dispersed into the air instead of being put to use. Researchers from Oregon State University, however, have created a prototype system that harnesses waste heat to (rather ironically) cool the device that’s creating the heat in the first place. While it isn’t the first system to do so, it is claimed to be unusually efficient ... and, it can generate electricity.  Read More