I recently saw an article about someone who “developed” a refrigeration method meant to be used in Africa or other areas without access to electricity that used evaporative cooling to cool the contents of the refrigerator. Such things work in dry environments, but are a fizzle in high humidity environments, especially in still air. Is there anything like this that can be used in high humidity that isn’t particularly exotic?
Thanks,
Rob
You could concoct schemes doing things like drying air with sorbents that get cycled to recharge them, and returning the air to ambient temperature, and then evaporating water into that dry air. You could also open and close a window to the sky to radiate heat away during the night. It’s debatable whether these approaches are “particularly exotic” or how easy they’d be to run without electricity, if that’s a goal.
Hey, you know what? You could move chunks of gadolinium into and out of the fields of magnets. They get hot in one location and cold in the other (I forget which is which). There was a plan to make home refrigerators on this principle. The beauty of it for challenging environments might be that you could use something other than electricity to move them, like wind or a sun-driven stirling motor, maybe even do it by hand - and there’s no fluid refrigerant or pumps.
Interesting article, ZenBeam. But my attention was caught by this:
Ozone-depleting refrigerants are now pretty much obsolete. And this new gadolinium scheme is certainly going to consume energy.
Maybe you could adapt a GE refrigerator to work. They always seem to be inventing new technologies. They even have a way to suggest new ideas for things on their website.