It would be awesome to see a updated prototype after 3 years to see if you had any ideas on increases in efficiency, especially combined with your solar setup and the stay cool paint. And thanks again for all the content, its always extremely inspiring.
You built an air cycle machine! When I was in the Air Force, I was an AGE mechanic and we had a unit that cooled air down so much it was frosty at the end of the duct. It was the -10 air cycle machine and it took heated (215 F) compressed air from the -60 start cart/generator/air compressor and turned it into frosty forced dry air (-10 F at the duct end), using nothing but dehydrators, heat sinks and speeding up the compressed air via Venturi restrictions. I always wondered why there was no civilian equivalent but then I figured nobody has a jet powered air compressor to feed the machine compressed air. But you found a way to do it without compressing the air! Lovely!
I heard a serviceman say something about this more years ago than I care to admit, but when I tried to find information on it years later, I couldn't find anyone who had hear anything about it. You sir, have just made my day as now I have another source mentioning this and now know I wasn't imagining it. Thank you for this and thank you for your service.
As someone who has been in the HVAC industry for 30 years and has tested commercial equipment in a psychrometric chamber I appreciate your creativity. I followed along and your system air flow is about 250 CFM and produces about 2000 BTU/Hr of sensible heat 0 BTU/Hr of latent heat at an EER of 11.7. Interesting concept using liquid desiccant! Great video!
for real haha. I got kicked out of physical science class often and didn't hand in projects. yet somehow this is one of my favorite channels on youtube. I think a lot of teachers just have no passion to share with the students. to them it's just a job and a paycheck.
@@chrishayes5755 That's usually not the issue, but rather the rigidity of modern education wears teachers down with frustration, along with the unreasonable kids and unreasonable parents. The unreasonable camp has been given a voice now, they make teachers miserable and there is nothing teachers can do about it. So hard to understand until you become a teacher.
What classes would he teach at your school. 'Shop' is naturally one of them at my small school but he would also be effective teaching 'Maths for Engineers' including 'Geometry and Calculus for C students' . He is so Cool he could teach 'American History for Stoners'. OK, Your turn
as a pipe and duct routing engineer, i have some tips! 1 insulate the duct that go in and out of the house. you could use insulated spiro ducts with silencers and plenums so you have a more quiet system and also less leaked heat from outside. 2 make the swampcooler bigger and 2 stage it to reach even lower temps for the coolant for the exchanger. 3 stack the radiator in series on the bigger swampcoolers. saves on the 2 radiator fans. i think you are getting close, it needs some balancing
darkevilapie, all sounds very good (except the high cost of insulated spiral ductwork-I expect everyone interested in this project would insulate the ductwork with insulation bats)
What I want to see is to put the whole thing under a roof to block off solar radiation, and put the solar waterheater on top of that roof to save some space, and if possible, show us how to run the thing at night when there is no sun as heater, etc, so many ideas...
@@4IN14094 To run at night, maybe fill a tank with hot dry desiccant during the day. Then run the desiccant through the swamp cooler and adsorption room cooler and into another tank during the night. Wonder if the tank volumes would be practical.
I'm an engineering student, currently drawing plans for a house and workshop I'd very much like to build in my lifetime. This channel, more than any other informs so many of my structural and hvac designs.. Simply amazing, I could watch this channel every minute of every day - even 10 runs through the same video I'll learn some little thing, something less considered. Youre responsible for so many redraws of my designs and I love you for it ❤ Never change.
More like two weeks. I suspect he has several cats in the fire at once. I myself can never do just one project at a time. My projects feed each other and amplify my productivity and inspiration.
Would be interesting to see a short update with your longer term performance, once you optimize the operation of your columns, pumps and fans. A former Chemical Engineer, but really like seeing practical uses for that around the home. Good work & Good Luck!
As an undergraduate Mechanical Engineer I find your videos awe inspiring. Some people may look at this venture and put it down to a persons desire to make money from youtube, however like many other people i feel like you are doing this for a greater good. I see that you have decided to make your life about educating strangers to the wonders of science, math and the universe. I sense that you are a man of gifting, and for that i must say as a complete stranger i deeply respect you. God speed Sir, keep it up.
Thanks and you are correct. It would be far easier to generate views and money with visually impressive, but poorly explained and demonstrated projects.
@@TechIngredients Was this system designed with any knowledge of Ammonia systems in mind or was it an independent idea. If not, what was the reasoning for chosing CaCl instead?
Well IT doe's What IT is set out to do!! IT can cool some degree under the air temp. but If he had burried the cooling tube in the ground .. the air temp would be even colder!!
If you're using solar panels to run the fans and pumps and then put cooling coils on the back of the photovoltaic panels, you could cool the panels and make them more efficient while heating your desiccant. Love watching your videos.
@@grrkaa8450 „a lot of efficiency“ you are talking about single digit percentages of efficiency gains here mate! I studied Solar cells for many years, so while you are right the thermic expansion in both ways when you are stealing their heat could then lead to cracks in the substrate or interconnections, shortening the lifespan of the solar cell. Don‘t forget that when thinking about heating and cooling, it‘ll always lead to expansion and shrinkage of materials present…
We have this hot chic in our hood and her dad is the painter. Even more hot is the mom. We refer to her as the painters daughters mom but usually we just say M I L F
this was really well made and concise.I was looking for the typical fudging of numbers to make it better than it is supposed to be and the ensuing tall claims,but you surprised me by your rigor of the scientific method and complete honesty at the conclusion, thanks for taking the time to document all this and hope you have great day
@@TechIngredients ever looked at a vortex tube.??.a big one,with minus temps,run on lpg compressor. just spin it round from winter to summer..free ish heat/cool,with no a/c gas .mine works in hot ,like 40c conditions,yours would heat up if not fully insulated.indoors.temp doesnt effect pressure as much,.like a steam train will go higher than a diesel train. we are kept dumb & paying for services..
Just now finding these videos. I must say, the most impressive skill this man possesses is the ability to explain everything without a prompter, in an understandable manner, probably even without a script. Plus an awesome capacity to make calculations on the fly. And as PappyMan says, a top-notch cameraman.
My dad was a director of a company called GEA Grenco Refrigeration and I worked there for him and we was working on a similar system to this to possibly be used on cruise ships. Obviously much larger but the principle and set up was very similar. Sadly my dad passed in 2002 so it was never brought to fruition but I have many many fond memories of our time together.
Plenty of cool salt water there and no need to use old warmed water either. And plenty of heat free otherwise being exhausted from clothes dryers, kitchens, engine room heat and likely many other sources. Thanks for sharing that.
Rick Fischer absolutely they need to be put into digital form or scanned in which I can arrange. I am sure my brother still has them somewhere as he cleared my mums property after she passed away in 2016 I’ll keep you posted.
Interesting concept. Few things that should be noted. 1. You should insulate your thin refrigeration lines. Low volume to surface area ratio on your lines means you likely are losing notable amounts of efficiency there. 2. You could get more evaporation if your radiator was at the bottom of your swamp cooler to heat the water you are evaporating with the fan. Minimizing the energy difference needed for evaporation = more evaporation caused by your fan. More heat causing evaporation means you'll have more cooling potential. Adding more heat here even through electrical power would be the quickest way to get more cooling. 3. As others have mentioned having IR reflecting glass likely is making your desiccant not absorb as much heat as possible. Normal glass would likely be better as it would stop losses due to hot air radiating away which is the main way to build up heat. Possibly could use aluminum/mirrors to focus more heat on it also like a solar oven, but you could just scale this up for the same effect. 3. Most commercial desiccant cooling systems use either use desiccant that is regenerated through compressor heat as you've mentioned. The main reason is a closed compressor system is not effected by outside humidity. A swamp cooler becomes near useless in high humidity environments. Wonder if just focusing on more solar heat & using an expansion valve for your desiccant solution would give you better performance that didn't care about the humidity.
would using a compressor negate one of the big upsides though which would be silent operating volume? in a lot of commercial applications the noise is quite a big factor to take in to consideration even if the unit is mounted outside.
@@grandeur7420 Compressor would likely make noise but the main use of dessicant air conditioners traditionally is in hot humid climates or indoor/greenhouse grows. In both operations you want to cool and remove humidity. Dessicant air conditioners exist in the industrial space and watching the shortcomings of this design drives home the reason companies have went with theirs imo. Swamp coolers will still have fan noise. So I don't think your noise level would be significantly higher with a normal air conditioner than this to be honest.
In regards to the compressor, I guess it depends on what your goal with the design is. If you're trying to achieve maximum efficiency in a device/system that would be manufactured in a plant, then yes I agree. However, if you're trying to design a DIY instruction set that a layman can put together with extremely easily sourced parts which will give manufactured systems a run for their money, then I disagree. I think one of the attractions of this system is this DIY aspect. Everything in the design so far is easy-peasy, no special tools required. There are plenty of children (thinking high school) who could safely build the system in this video. Add a compressor and the same cannot be said, however again it depends on your goal. Thumbs up anyways, good points overall.
Coming from a HVAC mechanic, this is a cool concept! Insulating the flow tubing after the heat exchangers to minimise temperature loss might be a good idea in higher ambient days. But a 3-4k supply/return temperature difference is pretty low, will definitely struggle to bring room temp down with extra heat load.
This is very demonstrative of how well he's used to explaining things in a fool-proof manner - it is far better to assume the audience knows nothing and over explain than to skip something that is "self evident" and confuse a portion of the audience.
Not very efficient though. I love the idea, but the heat exchange of air and liquid in a direct contact system like that is not nearly as efficient as a typical refrigeration condenser and evaporator setup.
17:45 Flow velocity in the center of the duct will be up to 2x higher than the average velocity throughout all of the cross-section (as it is used in for the calculation). This should be accounted for when calculating the performance of the system. Thank you for all the detailed and simple explanations in your videos!
@@ZipZoomZip yes i see what you are saying. If i just took a center point reading i would use a correction factor of .90. But i never experienced 2X the flow in the center of the duct. I usually took a series of readings on larger ducts but a small round its not that critical.
Nobody will watch this channel with me because it is so technical, but don't ever change it. Do I understand each nuance or formula; No. But I know where to come to re-examine it later. I love the presentation, the cooperation and effort it takes to produce it, and the information it provides.
Nice job! You are getting there! Suggestions: insulate the ducts. Flip the wye fitting for better air flow and Design a way that the water doesn’t get in the fan. The pressure drop of the air flow thru the wye fitting as you have it it huge. It is decreasing the flow making that turn. Redesign that part. Atomized nozzles are available for the spray heads. Take a look at a Kathabar system. Works on same principle. I have their design manual used for clean rooms. Next, use a psychometric chart instead of the engineering toolbox graph. You can obtain sensible and latent heat energy, vapor pressure, all properties of moist air. Use a wet bulb and dry bulb thermometer for more accurate results. Humidity meters unless very expensive ones aren’t very accurate. Kathabar design manual would be a huge help for you. They sale every piece of these systems for large industrial scale projects for liquid Desiccant. Check it out. No matter how you slice it, it’s gonna take a lot of energy to remove the heat energy from a space. I feel water source heat pump is still a great way to go. Keep up good work.
An in-depth analysis on self-sustaining projects after doing the project is the kinda overkill measurements that always keep me up at night. Giving us the numbers, measurements, tools, and know how for this, is perhaps the most scientific/humanitarian-support a person could ask for.
Thanks for measuring the power at AC! I think on the lab bench you measured only DC power coming from adjustable power supplies. Measuring at AC includes inefficiencies of AC->DC conversion. Bravo!
You should run the "wort cooler" in a counter-flow heat exchanger arrangement rather than parallel flow as it is now, that should cool the desiccant a few more degrees
Not to mention there's still a great spot to add another heat exchanger, running counter-flow as well. The output of the first desiccant column is cool and needs to be heated and the output of the second desiccant column is warm and needs to be cooled. Adding that would reduce the amount of solar heating needed as well as precool the desiccant before it goes into the radiator and wort cooler. Parallel flow is essentially running it backwards and he would get a good bit better performance if he fixed it.
@@AndrewMerts Absolutely, based on the lack of change in humidity in the room air we can say that evaporation is not whats cooling the room air at all, but rather being in contact with the cold desiccant fluid. Cooling the desiccant fluid as much as possible before running it through the room air loop would significantly improve the results. An interesting configuration would be to have two room air loops, one specifically for cooling the room air through evaporation of regular water, and another specifically for dehumidifying the room air using the (chilled) liquid desiccant. I think that is more like his small-scale prototype anyway?
@@EpicScandinavian I think the dehumidified air is exactly what is cooling the room; the dehummed air causes any moisture to evaporate out of the wood etc, cooling the room (did he give an aircon outlet temp?).
@@EpicScandinavian So essentially this system could be highly simplified by just using the last (swamp cooler) cooling tower, running the cooled liquid inside and inside run a fan through a radiator? Which is not the worst idea: swap out the compressor in a 'normal' airconditioner and use a swamp cooler to provide the cold. Saves on energy for the cost of some water. Or is my logic here wrong?
What a beautiful mind sharing his knowledge with the whole world. I am a Structural Engineer, but this gentle man has made me to look into building serviices. Thank you for widening my understanding of air conditioning.
swamp cooler pc watercooling is absolutely a thing. Only issue with it is the noise and refilling water. I didn't have any issues with contamination or overly-humid room air either :D
@@Deaner3D just get a hose and a float for the water. set it at the desired level and boom water refilling issue solved. and well the noise i guess use ear plugs.
Improvements: 1. condense the water of the second cooling tower and feed it as coolent into the third one. This way you get the water for free as well. 2. swap intake and outtake in the room. this way you dont suck in the cooled air again. So you allways get the hottest air from the top of the room.
Yes, improvement num 1. I was wondering why we aren't using the humidity we drive out to feed the water we need for the 3rd cooling tower. Not sure if it would help temps tho
2 seems like a good way to get a temperature gradient in the room. Heat rises. Therefore, cold air sinks. Therefore, if your cold air enters the room at waist height, the bottom of your room will get cold while the top of your room gets hot. Stick your hand in a chest freezer. (Or even a beer cooler full of ice.) There's a "wall of cold" you can feel by moving your hand in and out of the top with the lid open. Your whole room could end up like that with #2, at least in the short term. It might be better for overall efficiency, but it's worse for the time between when the cooling kicks on to when all the heat has been pumped out of the room. Depending on your thermostat situation, it might switch off before reaching that point.
I vision one incredible improvement after another. Insulating the outdoor aspects and adjusting the solar input through the glass inside are just two. Your build is so well adjusted from the earlier model and the variety of conditions that the experiment is working under would not affect accuracy in real life as it has under your scrutiny. Thank you so much, I'm looking forward to some adjustments that I might do myself. Keep doing, Kenny.
@@bashkillszombies There are examples of people making money out of open-source hardware designs. The 3D printing community is a good example, with companies such as Prusa or E3D. Some people don't do this stuff just for profit, but so that humanity can benefit. A system such as this, made with common parts, could be great for developing countries as it is cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than conventional AC units.
Greetings from Germany. Your first video inspired me to build a setup on my own based on your idea. I came across the same problems. I also change the diameter from DN 110 to DN 160. For the Bioballs I used another approach. To prevent them from forming a dense cluster I separated them in layers, 5 40mm balls in a layer, the layers divided by a stainless steel net. I also noticed that when I turned off the water pump in the the swamp cooler the air temperature drops even further (of course just for a moment because no water means no evaporation), so there can be too much water. In the next test I want to try out either reducing the flow or switching the pump in intervals. Unfortunately the summer is over and I have to wait till next year for further testing. The test setup I am building is a simplified version of the one you where showing in the first video. To separate the cold from the wet in the exhaust air from the swamp cooler I am going to use an air to air heat exchanger (non enthalpy one). As I said before unfortunately the summer is over and I can´t test the setup anymore but the good thing is the whole system is modular. So I can use the heat exchanger I already bought to build a ventilation system with heat recovery for the winter. Whilst I was looking up air to air heat exchangers I saw some nice DIY ones made from PVC plumbing pipe and oversized drinking straws. Which would made them cheap, non enthalpy and corrosive resistant. The small solar heater makes me happy, for 12 years I worked at a company building Solar heating equipment. I also worked for a company that build ventilation systems with heat recovery, hence the other idea.
This is great, i'd love to see more improved versions! This could be a game changer, given how it doesnt use any freon and possibly has a lower electricity consumption than traditional ACs
Great demo and explanations. As others have said, tons of opportunity for even greater efficiency. For example, sink a holding tank below grade where you can store lots of cold regenerated desiccant, which can be made even colder all night long. Also lets us switch on each stage as needed: circulating conditioned air on a thermostat, regeneration when the sun shines, and cooling of desiccant whenever tank temp rises.
Thank you for the technical information it is really helping me learn more about everything! Also, your film or taping rather is very precise and there's no shakiness everything has good light and is in focus! Thankyou camera person!! I can't wait till you do another cool project, your technical instructing is super informative. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!
@@TechIngredients For a second there, I thought you were an alien with a third hand showing the graphs and moving paper. Now that's a helpful cameraperson.
As I sit here watching this, while listen to my neighbors noisy AC unit on this warm summer night in the Texas desert. The one thing that really attracts me to this is how quiet it is. I'm extremely sensitive to noises/vibrations in general, always have been, and like things as nice, quiet, and as peaceful as possible. I have saved this video, and will probably try something like this when I build my own place out away from people. Thank you for taking the time to take us through the steps and processes to understand how to create a version of our own.
The newer modulating AC units are very quiet these days. Something like this won't work well in a humid environment like Texas unless you're in the desert of west Texas
I'm impressed, by redesigning the cooling system you resolved the bacterial issue and introduced the feature of air purification. Do you opensource your system? Are blueprints available? Thanks for your video!
honestly, once you know exactly what the desiccant is... This video is all you need. (I'm not sure he said it here, probably in the previous, but it is somewhere for sure)
@@Verrisin I think at the beginning of the video, he mentions Calcium Chloride, but on my experience Calcium Chloride emits HEAT when in contact with water
Honestly, I don't understand why people that are not involved on the build or the design of this device are answering a question that is not directed to them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you. Very interesting. When I self installed my geothermal loop, I included an heat exchanger for my solar thermal storage tank I could include in the loop during heating season. Working together it greatly improves both the efficiency of the heat pump (sourcing warmer water) and of the solar thermal panels (adding heat to relatively low inlet temperatures). It's a beautiful synergy. The marriage of heat pumps with solar should be seriously widely considered.
Technocracy does not work and has always only ever resulted in disaster, starvation, and mass graves. I'd rather we all run our own lives, and this gentleman run a business from which I can buy his creations.
5 лет назад
@@nERVEcenter117 Yet you can't actually cite any examples.
You may want to add a drip edge, (similar to ones that are found near rooves) within the cooling columns, this would ensure the liquid droplets are falling within the pipe, rather than running alongside the walls, while also allowing airflow. And like others have said you can extend some of the columns, double up the radiators in Ceres, and insulate insulate insulate.
I would like to see what happens if you pull the air out of the room from the top where it is hottest and then push it in via the lower pipe, in doing so stacking the cold air at the bottom and pushing the hot air out
I agree. The inlet and outlet should also be separated as far apart as possible, they are so close together, it's just pulling the cool air right back out of the room.
@Jamesy Garfield Most of the energy from the sun is non-infrared, while most of the energy the pipes give off will be infrared. Blocking infrared traps most of the incoming energy while blocking most of the outgoing energy. If you wanted to get stupid you could pressurize the heater with CO2 to make it trap even more energy :P
@@specialagentdustyponcho1065 a quick google says infrared energy of sunlight at the earth's surface is 52-55% - it's possibly not most but it's more than half.
24:53 Aww, that paper pull was kinda cute :D Im glad you get to do the stuff that apparently makes you happy and also educate people about it. Great channel :)
@@kebab4387 he's not using power cells, he's using a solar heater. That thing will work better the hotter it gets. Not sure if that would make the whole machine operate better tho
@@kebab4387 super hot weather here in Arizona may lose a small percentage of efficiency but I bet with the more sun hours a day here compared to other places like lets say the Pacific Northwest it will charge a battery faster and thus more efficient.
Yeah, No Doubt, all that complication for 3 deg F and its only 64 out side? Thats basically just a box fan in a window. Bring it to the Actual places its needed where the temps are 90+ and humidity is 80% year round and see how it performs..
Excellent! We are building a heated shipping container and container based production unit: Living in Zambia in winter we have sunny skies and need a very warm production space. Great ideas! Some of which we are already using. Love your channel.
This is the best DIY project Ive seen in RU-vid and will have an impact in our environment this can lower our electric bill (one of the highest in the World yes only in the Philippines), Save the environment (No Freon), Inspire young inventors..Thank you so much!
The problem is, these kind of systems don't work well in extremely humid conditions, because the air is already saturated, meaning it can't absorb much (if any) moisture from the air. And "extremely humid" is the only kind of weather the Philippines has.
@@Garryck-1 i just posted about that too lol. This is ok for your dry climates that involve needing humidifiers but in florida our humidity is insanely high.
I am building one of these, except I am using attached 5x 5 gallon bucket stacks for the evaporator stacks, and I used copper tubing for the solar heater.
I'd be interested to see a follow-up, testing this same system in a situation where A/C is really needed, like >90F temps and high humidity. Just how much volume of living space can it reasonably manage? Would it make sense to set up a plenum and distribute the cooled air over a large space or just have multiple units acting more like window A/C? Idk, maybe there's another video in this series that addresses this. I'm impressed with the quality of the videos on this channel, and have subscribed.
this!, its really hard for water to cool air that is already "Cool", I bet you can get better perfomance if the air is at 40c, you might be able to drop it to 18-24c just by using a humidifier (once you desacate the air)
as a chemical engineering fresh grad, i find this really exciting. it's basically chemical engineering in action with all the column design, heats of vaporization and solution, fluid flow, psychrometric charts. oh boyyy!
Maybe with some more tweaking the efficiency could be raised. Interesting system no high pressures and relatively safe components. I am a HVAC&R contractor. Would like to see it tested at or near to ASME standards
I still praise this video. It's a wonderful proof of concept. As many have said: with the aim of actually deploying this technology, there are so many areas to improve performance. Yet, four years on, seems nobody is doing this. A search of 'liquid desiccant' and 'evaporative cooling' turns up commercial providers such as Alfa Laval and Blue Frontier. Add 'residential' to the search and results are reduced to this video and a few research papers. ANYONE: know of anyone, private or commercial, that is building on this?
I love this sort of stuff! That water heater coil is genius. I wonder if you could connect several of those in series and get the water even hotter. Maybe even hot enough to kill off bacteria if the water was coming from a stream on your property for instance?
It would be interesting to see how this system performs if it is enclosed in an insulated structure separate from the structure being cooled. Maybe even power the pumps and fans with solar power? I know nothing about solar panels but I assume it would be possible to use them as the power source on sunny days.
Love this guys intellect & his amazing ability to explain all of of his ideas.. This system is clever but quite complicated. It shows how amazingly simple a window air conditioner is, hence why it is in production to this day.
Make a video on Optimizing this system. More insulation, better fans, larger swamp coolers!. see how good this could be. Also run it, use it and see how it does long term . Great job!
As an additional comment I really do appreciate the work demonstrated in the video. Recently my house required a new HVAC unit for $8400, last months bill was $319.00 in Mesquite Texas 75149. It would certainly be nice to scale the unit up to the size for a 2100 sqft house where actual cost figures could be obtained. I know this is probably beyond the scope of one's budget and I know I am just dreaming. Thanks again for the nice video and explanations.
Minisplits and solar are almost certainly a significantly better option than this. Evaporative cooling (once known as "swamp coolers") works better in low humidity and Texas, even in Mesquite, is a relatively humid place. But Mesquite, and much of the more central parts of Texas, get a whole lot of sun... so solar is pretty effective in Texas. And improving your house insulation, adding solar and using minisplits for the house are likely the most effective and efficient means of cooling and heating in Mesquite. Unless you want to spend more for DX geothermal, that is.
Amazing videos! I think a small improvement could be to switch the direction of either of the fluids in the wort chiller, so that they flow in opposite directions, to get a countercurrent heat exchange, so that the fluids will swap temperatures with each other (ideally), instead of, as of now with a cocurrent exchange, just reaching the mean temperature.
Great video, a wet and dry bulb reading of air entering and air leaving the system to calculate the grand total heat removed would have been more accurate. You measured sensible heat removed entering and leaving but used your initial water content of the air to calculate latent heat removed and capacity which was measured hours earlier and with different ambient conditions. Not a true measure of capacity but shows it works I suppose. As I commented on your last video, need wet bulb and dry bulb of entering and leaving to accurately measure grand total heat removed. Sorry to write such a long whingy comment but this is very interesting, you go very deep into the maths of it and are very exacting but don’t quite get an accurate reading of the process. Love the videos! They inspire me.
I have it on good authority that flat black paints are often not “flat black” in the infrared, but are fairly highly reflective. In order to get a paint that’s not highly IR reflective, one should use one of the very high temperature tolerant flat black paints, such as those used for automotive headers or BBQ grills. I don’t know if it makes any difference in your solar collector but it seems it might and it might be handy to keep in mind for other projects. Amazing videos, thanks.
Now that it's summer again, would you please consider doing this again during higher temperatures, and blocking the windows to keep the sun from heating the room? I'd love to see measurements on how this performs in higher temperatures and higher humidity levels.
I'm curious too as to how viable this would be during the Summer. Texas heat killed my AC units so an alternative would be nice to explore, even just to mess around with if the AC units are repaired/replaced
I'd say there is a reason why this video was taken at 17,5°C ambient outside, that's the moment where I need an AC most! unfortunately most of his videos are full of incorrect measurement, nice calculations but the moment he wants to prove those using measurement, the whole house of cards collapses...
You really need to get sponsorships for your videos. I can't believe there are no tool manufacturers or whatever engineering company that wants to advertise on your channel.
So to summarize my understanding, this system is a big outdoor swamp cooler that uses an air-to-water heat exchanger on a closed loop to transfer the cooling into your house. This closed loop exchange system allows you to use any waste water you want in the swamp cooler and allows you to use a special fluid in the closed loop. The special fluid shown here is salt water which, when exposed to humid interior air, pulls some of the moisture out of the air into the saltwater. After using the cool saltwater to chill and dehumidify the interior air, you then pass the now warmer, over-saturated salt water through a solar heater to get it hot and shower it down a pipe to force it to evaporate the humidity it just picked up. The remaining hot salt water then passes through a radiator to return it to ambient temperature before passing through the swamp cooler heat exchanger and dropping below ambient temperature. The now cooler-then-ambient saltwater flows through a water-to-water heat exchanger with the cooled swamp cooler wastewater to chill itself a little extra before finally returning to the original pipe that cools and dehumidifies the interior before starting the loop over. So at its core you'll only ever cool your house as much as a swamp cooler can. You can look up charts showing the lowest temperature a swamp cooler can achieve based out current temperature and humidity. What makes this system special is that it not only DOESNT add humidity to your interior air like a typical swamp cooler, but it actually goes a step further to REMOVE humidity which improves mugginess and the "felt" temperature of the air. Watt-for-watt it's not the best form of air conditioning since pretty much any mini-splits will use significantly less electricity to remove more heat from your home. But this system is potentially incredibly cheap if you source the parts correctly and incredibly easy to perform maintenance on since most components are interchangeable, upgradeable, and easily replaceable. It fits a small audience of people living in the correct climate, cooling a small space, looking to stretch their dollar and build an easily serviceable cooling system. Perhaps someone living in a small home off-grid with minimal solar panels in a location good for swamp cooling.
That's a good summary. In a humid environment a shallow geothermal ground loop would be better than the evaporative tower. Remember that the majority of the energy used in this system isn't high cost electricity and that compared to a commercial airconditioner which has thousands of man hours of engineering refinement behind it, this is a prototype.
@@TechIngredients @Tech Ingredients It's a brilliant prototype. I seriously considered using your system as a rough blueprint for one of my own, but certain limitations pushed me towards a typical minisplit, mainly for the added backup of electric heating. If you can get your system to operate under 100W, you would roughly match the watt-to-btu efficiency of my 22.5 SEER minisplit (at least under your measured conditions). Just spit balling here, you could replace the salt water desaturation tower and radiator+fan all with a passive solar distiller + reservoir. I'm thinking you could have a large flat reservoir of salt water that the interior-window-tower gravity drains into. Attach a piece of black sheetmetal to some basic EPS rigid foam board insulation and weigh it down so that the metal's surface sits just 1-2mm below the reservoir water's surface. Place a 120-200mm fan blowing over the surface. The surface will heat up rapidly thanks to the black metal absorbing and radiating heat and the thinly spread water and air movement will encourage rapid evaporation. The EPS insulation will both shade and deflect heat away from the reservoir's remaining volume underneath, and the floating platform will move as water level rises/drops. This way you're only ever heating the minimum amount of water volume for evaporation, rather than the entire volume. You can also oversize the reservoir's capacity so it experiences less temperature change over the course of the day and retains more night-time temperature from the previous night. The reservoir would gravity feed 1 pump to circulate the saltwater loop. Have the reservoir feed+supply lines near the bottom of the reservoir limit water movement on the floating platform's surface. This would eliminate the power consumption of 2 radiator fans, desaturation tower fan, and desaturation tower water pump, while only adding a 120-200mm fan with under a 10W power draw. This should put you just around 100W. And the cost of the system drops as you no longer need to build the solar collector, desaturation tower + electronics, and radiator. The sheetmetal + EPS + reservoir should cost significantly less and function similarly under the same solar conditions as your current system. Just my 2 cents lol
An ammonia heat engine would be much more compact and efficient and adequately safe. It might cost more to build [it is ammonia under pressure and requires the pressurized parts be stainless steel instead of polyethylene or copper], but it would be powered 100% by the sun and even operate on cloudy days [at a reduced level of course, but it would still work] and would work reversibly as a warming heat pump in winter as well as a cooling heat pump in summer.
I wouldn't trust myself to build an ammonia based system, but the one presented here looks possible with my skill level. (But thank you for including other options. Maybe when I level up I could try that.)
@@teyebhmoude9617 It's actually old evaporative tech vs "new" compressor tech here's an article I bookmarked on "the Einstein Fridge" You might also be interested in looking up Propane fridges, they work on a similar principle. www.theguardian.com/science/2008/sep/21/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
I have an idea! If you simply use your swamp cooler to cool a loop of water, and on that loop you had a large surface area water to air heat exchanger, you could use about a third of the components to achieve the same result and here is why: The salt water that dries the air needs additional refurbishment as you mentioned, even heating and cooling wildly back and forth. If you were to circulate evaporating water in your third tower there, and it just skips all that other jazz and just flows right through a nice radiator in an air loop inside, condensation will form on the radiator anyway, and you can drain that back into the swamp cooler to help with refilling lost water. It is surprisingly effective at condensing water! The added benefit is that now you could run just three water hoses through the window, or two air ducts, depending on where you locate the components. What do you think of the simplification? * I think heat is drawn mainly from the evaporative cooling, I noticed that you had some ambient air temperature cooling a radiator too, but I think if you follow the flow of the heat, your third tower is the coolest! ;] [Pun intended!]
For a home built prototype it works well when comparing to decades of R & D of a major manufactured unit. And its a lot more greener. Thank you. Cheers.
Very interesting and filled with information that I need to rewind on, which is great. Thanks for showing some mathematics into this project, you brushed down a few cobwebs in my head. I have an interest in miniaturizing or down scaling projects, I will have fun with this one. Thanks for your related videos
Actually I don't know why I am here. RU-vid recommended me. I know nothing about what he is talking, but I am just wow by him. Totally sounds like a professor from university teaching some classes. And I am that clueless student just mind blown by how much knowledge is stored in this cool man brains.
The duct may have a flow of 5 m/s in the center, but gradually transitions to a slower rate, approaching zero, where the air touches the surface of the duct. Thus, the mass of air moved may be much less than half of what you calculated.
Unfortunately, you don't need A/C as much when it is dry because in climates such as the US east coast it tends to also be cool during those times. I'm not sure when this video was recorded but based on the weather it seems recent; in the last few weeks we have had quite cool and dry weather. When you need your A/C the most in this climate is when it is 90f and 80% humidity, or 80f and 90% humidity, or 76f and 100% humidity. In these conditions we care most about, I would expect the "swamp cooler" portion of your apparatus to be much less effective. So while this design seems good for other concerns such as long term maintainability, it seems to fail at practical efficiency.
