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24 articles, most recently updated first
The liquid-sorbent cousin of adsorption: a thermally-driven cycle using a liquid absorbent (lithium bromide/water for air conditioning, ammonia/water for refrigeration) and a small…
Vapor-compression refrigeration is the dominant cooling cycle and the electricity-paid, high-COP baseline against which every heat-driven alternative in this KB is measured. The 20…
How the adsorber's physical bed — granular, finned, coated, metal-foam, or 3D-printed TPMS — governs specific cooling power. Every conductivity-boosting move buys heat transfer at …
Adsorption cooling produces cold from low-grade heat (typically 60–95 °C, feasible from ~50 °C) using a solid porous adsorbent that alternately adsorbs and desorbs a refrigerant va…
The not-in-kind cooling technologies that bypass the refrigerant cycle entirely — magnetocaloric, thermoacoustic, thermoelectric, thermionic, thermotunneling. A 2010 PNNL assessmen…
CO₂ (R744) is a natural, low-cost, non-flammable, near-zero-GWP working fluid that appears in this KB in two cooling roles: as the working fluid of a CO₂ combined cooling, heating …
The buyable state of the art in adsorption chillers as of September 2026: who makes them (Fahrenheit/SorTech, InvenSor, Bry-Air, plus Mitsubishi AQSOA as an OEM adsorbent), their m…
The organizing map of cooling technologies in this wiki, sorted by what drives the heat pump — low-grade heat, electric work, sunlight, radiant emission, or the ground. The through…
Covers cooling without a full refrigeration cycle: handling the latent (humidity) load with a desiccant and rejecting the sensible load to cool outside air via an air-side economiz…
What dome geometry does for passive cooling: Fuller's 1940 'reverse chimney' DDU discovery, CFD validation (52% cooling energy reduction, 8 K cooler than flat roofs, 30% less surfa…
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) drill horizontal well pairs into hot crystalline rock at 2.5–4.7 km, connect them with propped multistage hydraulic fractures, and circulate water…
The cheapest cooling is the cooling you never have to make: the building envelope sets the load every downstream machine must meet. Collects structural insulated panels (14× lower …
Geothermal (ground-source) HVAC uses the stable temperature of the earth as the heat-rejection sink (and winter heat source) for a heat pump, raising efficiency exactly when coolin…
Geothermal brine has driven absorption chillers in the field since 1980, but the record is thin and mixed: Oregon Tech's 1,095 kW LiBr unit on 89 °C water delivered half its namepl…
A heat battery stores energy as high-temperature heat in cheap solid mass and releases it on demand, acting as the storage counterpart to heat-driven cooling. It firms up intermitt…
A heat pump runs the cooling cycle as a two-way machine and is the decarbonization workhorse for electrifying both heating and cooling. The registry's three-item collection points …
Hydronics is moving heat with water — the source-agnostic distribution layer that connects every source in this KB to the rooms that need conditioning. Its neutrality lets adsorpti…
The surface physics of moving heat by radiation, enabling two cooling moves: rejecting heat by emitting it to the cold sky (Purdue's BaSO4 paint: 98.1% reflectance, 0.95 sky-window…
Solar-driven adsorption cooling — the load-coincident application where sunlight supplies the desorption heat. Spans intermittent single-bed solar ice makers (the collector IS the …
Answers 'is there a better option for solar thermal cooling?' For most applications, yes: PV + electric heat-pump/vapor-compression now out-competes solar-thermal sorption cooling,…
Solar thermal is the heat supply for sun-driven cooling, delivering desorption heat to an adsorption chiller with the key virtue of coincidence between peak insolation and peak coo…
Solid-state cooling replaces the vapor-compression refrigerant with a solid (or near-solid) whose entropy changes under a field — pumping heat with no compressor and no high-GWP ga…
Which phase-change materials are translucent enough to sit in a window, and how they're packaged. Ranking: salt hydrates (CaCl2·6H2O) are the only bulk PCM naturally clear in BOTH …
The quantified record of pre-mechanical cooling: windcatchers (4–12 °C depending on source, up to 30 ACH), courtyards (1–3 °C), thermal mass and earth coupling (5–10 °C), night flu…