Cooling Technologies Overview
Cooling Technologies Overview
Cooling Technologies Overview
The map of cooling technologies compiled in this wiki, organized by how the heat actually gets moved. The through-line is a bias toward heat-driven and passive cooling — systems that run on waste heat, sunlight, or the cold sky rather than on grid electricity through a compressor.
The organizing question: what drives the pump?
Every cooling system moves heat from cold to hot, against the gradient, so something must drive it. What drives it is the cleanest way to tell these technologies apart:
| Driven by… | Technology | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Low-grade heat (waste/solar) | Adsorption — solid sorbent + water; cold from 60–95 °C heat | Adsorption Cooling ★ keystone · Performance & Numbers |
| Low-grade heat (waste/solar) | Absorption — liquid sorbent (LiBr/water, ammonia/water); the higher-COP, more mature cousin | Absorption Cooling |
| Electric work (compressor) | Vapor compression — the refrigerant-cycle baseline everything is measured against | Vapor Compression |
| Sunlight → heat | Solar thermal — collectors that supply the heat to drive sorption cooling | Solar Thermal |
| Radiant emission to the sky | Radiative / black-body surfaces — passive heat rejection and solar absorption | Radiative & Façade Cooling |
| The ground as heat sink | Geothermal / ground-source — stable earth temperature for heat rejection | Geothermal |
| Electric work (alt. cycles) | Heat pumps — including water (R718), ejector, and solid-state electrocaloric frontiers | Heat Pumps |
| Solid-state / acoustic (no refrigerant) | Not-in-kind — magnetocaloric, thermoacoustic, thermoelectric, thermionic | Alternative Cooling Technologies |
Supporting threads (smaller source sets)
| Theme | What it covers | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Carbon Dioxide (R744) | CO₂ as a natural working fluid — transcritical CCHP, and the activated-carbon/CO₂ adsorption pair | CO₂ (R744) |
| Desiccant & free cooling | KyotoCooling air-side economization; dehumidification-driven (sorbent) cooling | Desiccant & Free Cooling |
| Heat battery | Rondo-style high-temperature thermal storage — the storage counterpart that firms up intermittent drive heat | Heat Battery |
| Hydronics | Hot/chilled-water distribution — the source-agnostic fabric connecting every source to the space | Hydronics |
| Envelope & glazing | Load reduction first — SIPs, double-skin façades, UV-transmitting acrylic (resist / manage / transmit gain) | Envelope & Glazing |
★ = the keystone for the 601 Delaware application — waste-heat adsorption chilling.
Sources
All compiled from the hothothot Zotero group library → Joule Heist → Topics cooling subcollections (~150 references). See raw sources.
See also
- Master Comparison — the side-by-side table of every technology (COP, SCP, drive temp, maturity, best-fit)
- README — what this wiki is and how it relates to 601 Delaware
- 601 Delaware — Cooling Strategy — the building-applied summary