In a world facing increasingly hot summers, cooling technologies can be life-savers. But cranking up air-conditioning only adds more planet-warming gases to the atmosphere.
Researchers in China say they have now developed a cooling device that, by absorbing heat, brings down skin temperature by 7°C. By cooling people instead of entire buildings, it could cut the energy use of standard air-conditioning in half, the team reports in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.
“Our design aims to solve several critical problems of traditional air-conditioning systems,” says Yuekuan Zhou, a sustainable energy and environment researcher at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Its low energy efficiency in large open spaces, the spread of pollutants and airborne disease transmission through air-conditioning systems, and the discomfort caused by fan noise and airflow.”
Zhou and colleagues designed a novel cooling device built on a commercial thermoelectric heat pump. Thermoelectric coolers transfer heat from one side of the material to another, and are used in high-end portable coolers and mattress pads.
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