Passive passenger compartment cooling

[freebeard]

I read the abstracts. The third:

We find that evaporation from centimetre-sized carbon black sheets can reliably generate sustained voltages of up to 1 V under ambient conditions.

Maybe a swamp cooler could support it's own fan?

[Gasoline Fumes]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

One thing I've thought about is dash cooling. Run waterlines right under the dash and then up to a radiator with a fan, but could be powered by a small solar panel. It just seems to me that the dash is one of the main places that heat gets into the car (roof can be white or covered in aluminum foil or chrome or something like that). You could have a reflective dash, but that would be hard to see as it would reflect onto the windshield. Hence, why adding cooling to the dash makes sense to me, that way less heat will get into the car.

I recently noticed that polarized sunglasses cut virtually all dash reflections. I might try a white dash cover next summer. Can't buy one in white. Maybe a bathmat? The large black dash of my Insight radiates so much heat.

[Logic]

Originally Posted by Gasoline Fumes

I recently noticed that polarized sunglasses cut virtually all dash reflections. I might try a white dash cover next summer. Can't buy one in white. Maybe a bathmat? The large black dash of my Insight radiates so much heat.

Yep polarized glasses are almost magical in the way they can make dash reflections disappear and glare in general disappear.
At night 'clear' polarized driving glasses are an experience!
It's a wonder evolution hasn't built it into our eye lenses!

Imagine this:
Polarized windscreen at a 45 degree angle.
Headlight glass polarized at the same angle. (parallel)

Do that to all cars and any oncoming headlights are polarized at 90 degrees to your windscreen... meaning no more blinding oncoming car lights in anyone's eyes.

Now you may be ready to jump into your car and dash off to the patent office! (I was! )
Don't bother: It's been thought of and tested.

The polarized light leaving your headlights is unpolarized /scattered, to a large degree, upon hitting and being reflected back from the objects ahead you want to see .
But you can only see the reflected light that happens to be at the 45 degree angle of your windscreen's polarization.

So the amount of polarized light you need to put out from your headlights before you can see equally well, is (or was) way more than the idea was worth.

(Thats all IIRC: It's been decades since I looked into this)

[Logic]

Originally Posted by freebeard

I read the abstracts. The third:


Maybe a swamp cooler could support it's own fan?

Ye the volts are all close to 1V, but the current's around 0.0001 amps.
So under 0.1 milli watts per square cm at this stage of the research.

So around 1 square meter per watt.
Lets hope the scientists can improve those numbers.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Maybe a swamp cooler could support it's own fan?

All the swamp coolers I see fitted to trucks in my country have an electric fan.

[freebeard]

But are they powered by the evaporating water?

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by freebeard

But are they powered by the evaporating water?

No. In fact, they even resort to an electric water pump.