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20 articles, most recently updated first
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…
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, aircrete (…
The surface physics of moving heat by radiation, enabling two cooling moves: rejecting heat by emitting it to the cold sky, and the inverse problem of absorbing solar heat efficien…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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,…
The buyable state of the art in adsorption chillers: who makes them (Fahrenheit/SorTech, InvenSor, Bry-Air, plus Mitsubishi AQSOA as an OEM adsorbent), their model specs and workin…
The liquid-sorbent cousin of adsorption: a thermally-driven cycle using a liquid absorbent (lithium bromide/water for AC, ammonia/water for refrigeration) and a small solution pump…
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 (60–95 °C) using a solid porous adsorbent that alternately adsorbs and desorbs a refrigerant vapor instead of using an electric…
The not-in-kind cooling technologies that bypass the refrigerant cycle entirely — magnetocaloric, thermoacoustic, thermoelectric, thermionic, thermotunneling. A PNNL assessment rat…
CO₂ (R744) is a natural, low-cost, non-flammable, near-zero-GWP working fluid that appears in this KB in two cooling roles: as a transcritical mechanical-cycle fluid in a CO₂ CCHP/…
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…
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 when cooling demand…
A heat pump runs the cooling cycle as a two-way machine and is the decarbonization workhorse for electrifying both heating and cooling. This collection points at the mainstream dep…
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…
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 …
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. It is …