#passive cooling

Rowers Pavilion Moto Guzzi, Mandello del Lario, Italy - Act Romegialli

Years ago, after we had the foundation dug up for much-needed waterproofing, we planted some shrubs along that north-west wall. There was a point where I was trying to keep them pruned just a bit, so I could enjoy the view from the windows - but I ended up realizing that the heat reduction from allowing the shrubs to grow to their full height and shade the wall was more important. BOY does it ever make the house cooler to have those there (and, of course, the bog oak tree to the right). I definitely should have planted them one big steppy farther away; a couple of them are ridiculously close to the wall.

My semi-overgrown porch, with one multicolored solar lantern hung in the flower bed. There is a string of plain solar lights along the stair railing, too, that hadn't come on yet when I took this. Jeeeeez I love solar lights. Pretty happy with my black-eyed susan jungle, too.

A team of chemists and materials scientists at Sichuan University, in China, has developed a photoluminescent aerogel with a visible light reflectance of 104%. In their study, published in the journal Science, the group created their aerogel from readily available biomass. Changyu Shen and Xianhu Liu, with Zhengzhou University, also in China, have published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining work surrounding the development of polymeric passive radiative cooling materials and the work by the team on this new effort.

Researchers discover new mechanism to cool buildings while saving energy

With temperatures rising globally, the need for more sustainable cooling options is also growing. Researchers at UCLA and their colleagues have now found an affordable and scalable process to cool buildings in the summer and heat them in the winter. Led by Aaswath Raman, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, the research team recently published a study in Cell Reports Physical Science detailing a new method to manipulate the movement of radiant heat through common building materials to optimize thermal management. Radiant heat, which is felt whenever a hot surface warms our bodies and homes and is carried by electromagnetic waves, travels across the entire broadband spectrum at ground level between buildings and their environments, such as streets and neighboring structures. On the other hand, heat moves between buildings and the sky in a much narrower portion of the infrared spectrum known as the atmospheric transmission window. The difference in how radiant heat travels between buildings and the sky versus the ground has long presented a challenge to cooling buildings with less skyward-facing surfaces. These buildings have been hard to cool in the summer as they retain heat from the ground and neighboring walls when the outside temperature is high. They are equally difficult to warm in wintertime as the outdoor temperature drops and the buildings lose heat.

Iranian-style windcatchers would fit perfectly with the spires of Oxford. Hell, turn the spires into windcatchers even. Anything to defeat my reverse seasonal depression

Super Adobe in Jericho

Super Adobe in Jericho If you look to indigenous people for inspiration many low tech solutions left by our ancestors can suit us fine today. And one dreamer and doer that our friends go to intern with in the past is the late Nader Khalili from Iran. he had a dream to build womb-like homes for desert dwellers and lived out his dreams at Cal-Tech in California where models of his natural buildings…

Four ways to increase comfort

Generally speaking, there are four ways to increase comfort through cooling:

Reducing heat gain entering a building, using:

materials with high thermal resistance (insulation and window coatings)

thermal mass (green roofs, dense construction materials)

protection from the sun’s heat (window film, dynamic windows, pergolas, shutters, shades, blinds, overhangs, vegetation and trees), and

reflecting the heat away (cool roofs, paint).

Removing heat from interior spaces with natural and mechanical ventilation. Both use less energy than mechanical air conditioning, and in the appropriate climate, if designed and operated properly, can remove the hottest air to lower the average temperature.

Storing heat and cold, using:

thermal mass (dense building materials) and

phase-change materials – like wax and water that absorb heat when a space is hot and re-emit it when the temperature falls.