Three of the ten hottest days of the last 75 years in Spain We suffer this summer. August was Extremely warm and The Mediterranean is a “pressure pot”. These conditions They involve greater use of air conditioningbut it is not a restricted phenomenon to Spain: the number of heat days also increases in other countries. Urgent changes in the materials with which we buildand a couple of Swedish designers have taken a brick capable of lowering the temperature around them.
It is called Bloc, and the best of all is that it uses the same technology as a botijo.
3D printed terracotta. Luc Schweizer and Andrin Stocker are members of the Higher School of the Arts of Zurich –ZHDK– They had an idea: convert certain points of the cities into “cold” places. Do in public space is complex because depending on the air-conditioning It is not a very viable option, and trees cannot do all the work either.
They occurred to them something better: combine in a terracotta brick both a wind tunnel and a water tank. The promise is that the temperature of the space can lower around it by about nine degrees, and the most amazing thing is that it can achieve it with a combination of solar energy and Evaporation cooling.
Botijo technology. All this botijo looks like a joke, But it is not. This clay gadget It has a very simple operation To keep the water fresh inside: it is filtered through the pores of the walls of the botijo and, by contrast to the exterior, evaporates. Evaporate water takes part in the thermal energy of water, so the remaining liquid is maintained at a fresher temperature.
As They affirm Those responsible, “is a low technology modular cooling system that uses evaporation cooling to reduce air temperature.” The operation is identical to that of the botijo, thanks to the fact that porous ceramic bricks absorb the water and it evaporates abroad, but with a nuance: they have added a fan.
This fan drives the air through the wind tunnel that form the bricks and the cooler air goes abroad, cooling the most immediate space to the structure. To make it more sustainable, structures have Solar panels which are the ones that feed the fan.
Modular. Within each brick there is a small water tank, which the equipment estimates that it would have to be filled with both rainwater collection naturally by the ‘device’ design and with water from municipal services. It would be the largest stumbling block, because otherwise, they claim that it is totally modular and the structures can grow freely both in height and in width.
Apart from A kind of umbrellas With banks around them, they can be used to create refrigerated marques or cooler bus stops.
Next steps. Before launching the bells on the fly, as is usually the case in these cases, it is a mere project. Both are already creating a 1: 1 scale prototype to test it in a real urban environment and evaluate long -term performance, but see applications like this in the streets around the world will not be immediate.
They also comment that, apart from their outdoor use, other applications can be explored, such as integrate them into the facade of a building to cool large interior spaces such as exhibition rooms.
Is not so unique. As a curiosity, in India they are already testing something very similar: clay flutes with this same technology They are able to lower the temperature of exterior and interior spaces between six and fifteen degrees, but that have the same problem: or have water … or do not work. Bloc, specifically, needs about 50 liters of water in hot days.
Apart from whether or not these innovations end up applying, it is interesting to see How millenary technology is the touchstone for current problems. And how we keep looking again and again at the materials and to the bricks of the past.
Images | ZHDK
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings