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	[[topics/adsorption-cooling
Low-grade heat (waste/solar)	Absorption — liquid sorbent (LiBr/water, ammonia/water); the higher-COP, more mature cousin	[[topics/absorption-cooling
Electric work (compressor)	Vapor compression — the refrigerant-cycle baseline everything is measured against	[[topics/vapor-compression-cooling
Sunlight → heat	Solar thermal — collectors that supply the heat to drive sorption cooling	[[topics/solar-thermal
Radiant emission to the sky	Radiative / black-body surfaces — passive heat rejection and solar absorption	[[topics/radiative-cooling
The ground as heat sink	Geothermal / ground-source — stable earth temperature for heat rejection	[[topics/geothermal
Electric work (alt. cycles)	Heat pumps — including water (R718), ejector, and solid-state electrocaloric frontiers	[[topics/heat-pumps
Solid-state / acoustic (no refrigerant)	Not-in-kind — magnetocaloric, thermoacoustic, thermoelectric, thermionic	[[topics/cooling-technology-alternatives

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	[[topics/carbon-dioxide-r744
Desiccant & free cooling	KyotoCooling air-side economization; dehumidification-driven (sorbent) cooling	[[topics/desiccant-and-free-cooling
Heat battery	Rondo-style high-temperature thermal storage — the storage counterpart that firms up intermittent drive heat	[[topics/heat-battery-thermal-storage
Hydronics	Hot/chilled-water distribution — the source-agnostic fabric connecting every source to the space	[[topics/hydronics
Envelope & glazing	Load reduction first — SIPs, double-skin façades, UV-transmitting acrylic (resist / manage / transmit gain)	[[topics/envelope-and-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

• Getting Started — new to this wiki? Start here for reading paths and a guide to how it’s organized
• Master Comparison — the side-by-side table of every technology (COP, SCP, drive temp, maturity, best-fit)
• Solar Cooling: PV vs Thermal — is solar-thermal sorption still the right call vs PV+heat-pump? The cost/COP decision and where each wins
• Adsorption vs Absorption — the foundational surface-vs-bulk distinction the two heat-driven families rest on
• Kleptothermy — the biological “joule heist”: harvesting an existing thermal stream, the namesake mirror of this KB’s heat-driven theme
• Geometric Blackness — shape-based light trapping for coating-free solar-thermal absorbers
• Solid-State & Caloric Cooling — refrigeration without a compressor: the caloric family + thermoelectric
• Translucent PCM Glazing — passive latent-heat storage at the window: which PCMs stay see-through, and building one
• PV Array Electrical Output — max voltage/current of PV arrays (supporting reference for PV-driven cooling)
• README — what this wiki is and how it relates to 601 Delaware
• 601 Delaware — Cooling Strategy — the building-applied summary