What’s Old Is New: Customizable System for Sustainable Cooling

By Tom Fleischman, Cornell Chronicle

Evaporative cooling is far from new – it has been used to cool living spaces and drinking water for centuries – but the Matter of Tech Lab at Cornell Tech has come up with a new way to deploy an old idea.

Lab director Thijs Roumen, assistant professor at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and two lab members have developed CeraPiper, a fabrication system that creates customized sizes and shapes of ceramic pipes via extrusion. The pipes can be shaped on demand, fitted together and filled with water for environmentally friendly cooling.

“This custom variability, being able to tailor each individual piece to the specific properties that you’re looking for, is something that we feel adds a lot of value,” said Ofer Berman, former postdoctoral researcher at the Matter of Tech Lab who presented “CeraPiper: Custom Extruded Ceramics for Evaporative Cooling” at the Association of Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Computational Fabrication, Nov. 20-21 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read more in the Cornell Chronicle.