How we can turn the cold of outer space into a renewable resource | Aaswath Raman
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- What if we could use the cold darkness of outer space to cool buildings on earth? In this mind-blowing talk, physicist Aaswath Raman details the technology he's developing to harness "night-sky cooling" -- a natural phenomenon where infrared light escapes earth and heads to space, carrying heat along with it -- which could dramatically reduce the energy used by our cooling systems (and the pollution they cause). Learn more about how this approach could lead us towards a future where we intelligently tap into the energy of the universe.
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This is what TED is supposed to be about!
Francis Lai nah. Wage gap!!
Ain't that great that Ted came to fruition before the 21st century?
I mean, well yeah. You’re not wrong.
Half the viewers of TED are still pretty jazzed about coal: The energy of the future.
This is just a bunch of mansplaining. Where is the female representation? Misogyny all around here.
I like how he uses Celsius. A sure sign he's gonna succeed.
how does that mean he's going to succeed?
@TheBestLettuce
To put into context, here's a comparison between the two temperature scale:
100°C = Boiling Point = 212°F
36°C = Normal Human Temp = 97°F
0°C = Freezing Point = 32°F
-273°C = Absolute Zero = -459°F
As of how people would use "percentage" or "0 to 100" for evaluating any progression,
Would you rather use the Temperature Scale that work the same with "percentage" to make things easier or would you go with the One that has no relevancy to any other type of scale or measurment that give you zero-to-none advantage in normal calculation?
OF COURSE, he would use celsius! everyone in a scientific setting does!
Well, shouldn't we all use Kelvin?
Gold Vogel why is that?
Using the sun for energy and the space for cooling. Humans are badass...
no we are stupid for believing this
+Yeezy Yeezy
Actually if we could transfer heat away like this space could also be used for energy. Like he said at 12:00 we could use that energy to generate power without fuel.
Actually thinking a little bit more about it now you wouldn't need to transfer that energy to space. We could make a box put a wall in the middle were heat can only be transferred through at a certain frequency, put a hole somewhere to allow that heat to escape and you could generate electricity from it simply by making one section of the box hotter than it is outside and the other section colder.
I actually like that idea better because then we wouldn't need to transfer energy into space. (Unless absolutely necessary)
Aw man. It almost feels like a perpetual motion machine when I put it that way. I'm just thinking of it like a neurons action potential only with continuous production of electricity.
@AnteConfig it have fuel, thermal energy,
Quentin Bean, you don't understand physics real well, do ya?
AnteConfig it doesn’t generate it from nothing. I think it is essentially saying the heat the sun puts on earth during the day. We convert the infrared energy at night using temperature difference at night. Energy can’t come from nothing. It seams like a more complicated version of solar to me. I prefer his idea of coating the solar panels with a layer that prevents the suns energy heating the solar panel and instead helps cool them. They are much more efficient when cool.
"...and I touched it, it was cold." :)
The instant he said ‘imagine something being cooler when you take it out of the shade’ and I just thought, imagine that in clothing. Imagine not being trapped inside by heat in a world that is so hot it’s inhabitable without assistance in some areas, which is where the earth may end up being. Living underground, in the sides of caves, earth ships etc is one thing, but the ability to make it portable? Or just taking ‘passive’ cooling to a whole new level, when looking at the heat on the tops of cars and the sides of skyscrapers and imagining them staying cool instead.
This is real thinking outside of the box ! Not without commercial ulterior motives !
Need to get Thunderf00t on this. He loves his thermodynamics :P
He will probably wrek it apart
I am not entirely sure what is there to wreck. If i read the short form correctly, it's about glass beads at a certain size resonating and pushing infrared light out, with the size tuned to prefer those wavelengths mentioned. The performance was also not in the realms of fantasy, iirc it was to the tune of 100W per square meter. If we can capture photons (and a small bit of heat) with 15% efficiency in run of the mill solar panels today, then we are capturing 150Watt per square meter in actual electrons, then surely we must be able to do something more "primitive" as well. "All" that is done here is radiate heat, but in frequencies which are not that easily absorbed by the air around us, and then adding a reflective (but not blocking) layer on top to keep the sun from throwing a wrench in the works. Simple, but brilliant.
He also loves hearing himself talk.
His vids are 2/3 too long.
They are also too much bullshit. His ego is too big. He just likes to make himself look like he knows better and is smarter than everyone else. (thats probably why he likes to target Elon's ideas so much. If you're gonna try and look smarter than someone else, better look smarter than Elon rather than Trump). Doesn't recognize the fact that there are other smart(er) people in the world who have reason to believe the obvious obstacles can be overcome or at least that it is worth trying.
yeah I feel suspicious because its sounds too good to be true, cooling stuff passively without energy is like generating heat passively without using energy
Sir you have hit a homerun here, knocked it out of the park!
This is how I understood it. He is using light as a shuttle to space. Not bringing the cold of space back down but sending the heat away from the source using refraction and reflection. Is that about it? Disperse the heat you can't send back and send the heat you can with the heat we want to get rid of?
Radiate more Heat than you can absorb.
Exactly.
Well, you could see cold as simply the absense of heat just like darkness is the absense of light. So no you cant bring the cold from space, just like you cant bring the darkness from space. But you can send the heat to the cold space. (although i dont really see why you need space for that, and i doubt much of the heat reaches space, if it gradually gets absorbed by the atmosphere rather than directly by the first molecules near the material should be fine i think)
Yes, they're sending the heat out in space. Space isn't cold, space is nothing, so warmth will natrually want to go there. The problem is that there's stuff inbetween.
I asked same question about 7 years ago to few of my friends. The sun heats our planet as we all know. According to physics the energy we gain on earth planet can not be destroyed. So this video explains how our planet's energy is equalized on daily basis.
When I heard the explanation of renewables using cold characteristics of space, I thought it would be very beneficial, and I hoped that a realizable day would come soon.
This can be revolutionary. I hope all the governments and electronics corporations take up this technology
First TED talk I've seen for a while that has given me so much hope. The fossil fuel industry will hate you.
This tech has SO MUCH potential....hope this idea works well and everything goes as planned...
Awesome invention! I hope it will work out as well as it sounds and be economically viable. It feels like most of the good technologies we have nowadays rely on electricity, therefore I find it amazing to see new ideas rising up, that abandon the use of electricity completely by simply abusing physics
It is amazing that refrigeration accounts for 17% of the world's electricity consumption. But it's also amazing that we can replace it with a cooling principle, but we're disappointed that we can't use it because of the sun. And I was surprised. That he built a panel and used the cooling principle.
This material sounds fantastic. I woild love to play with a sample if it were on market. Paring this with a solar sterling engine that worked in the day time and stored the excess heat it couldn't process, then reverse the hot and cold ends and the heat flow at night could help even out the solar power usage equation.
If anyone wanted to try this at home on a smaller scale, there's a similar, though less effective radient cooling effect that was reported by the folks who came up with the solar funnel, a solar cooking device that's easier to hobble together than a parabolic solar cooker. They said they pointed the funnel at empty space at night (no lights or other obstructions or clouds within the cone of the funnel's projection) and were able to freeze water in what was normally the cooking area of the solar funnel. Something like this may be able to run a sterling engine to generate electricity at night when solar can't, at least enough for demonstration purposes
Wow! New efficient ideas are emerging. At day time we have solar panels and then night sky cooling.👏
They should also place this material on the glass doors of refrigerator in stores to help keep things cool. Glass buildings could be cooled this way also.
this idea needs more attention!!!
'Generate light from darkness!' **mind blown***
seems like 1 should be able to make that into a primary refrigeration system by combining it with a phase change refrigerant powered by solar pv & using a huge area of these cold panels on the heat rejection end.
Excellent! Finally we can move to Type 1 civilization!
While the efficiency gain demonstrated isn't trivial, is a nano-photonic cooler constructed with hafnium and silver the most resource-effective option for achieving it? I would be much more impressed if such a device could be constructed using more common materials. This happens to be one of the problems that plagues the solar industry; many of the current photovoltaic regimes utilize uncommon and expensive materials for construction that make their deployment uneconomical.
Not sure about the power generation thing.
We are already in a situation where our power requirements are coupled to temperature (greenhouse effect). If we rely too heavily on this space-cooling effect, we'll reduce earths albedo and end up in the same situation, just in the opposite direction. Ideally what we need are ways to generate power that have no effect on the environment whatsoever.
The cooling potential is awesome though :)
The shiny reflecting foil on the Apollo lunar lander and on satellites is an example of radiative thermal control. Radiative cooling is due to blackbody radiation and is a well known formula called Planck's Law, first proposed in 1900 by Max Planck. Light colored and shiny materials reflect much of the received visible light and dark materials absorb visible light, but all materials reradiate their internal thermal energy with "black" objects doing so according to this formula. Light is only a small part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum between around 400 and 700 nanometers.This transmission window presented here between 8 and 13 micrometers is in the infrared (heat wavelengths) range and is 11 to 32 times the wavelength of light. It is good to know of this atmospheric transmission window. The material being proposed must be designed to behave like a blackbody in this wavelength range. Also noted was the fact that the material is highly reflective, another desirable property for this purpose.This pursuit shows promise. I look forward to seeing more in the future.
The solution is having well thermic isolated homes.
With a good isolated room you do not need Air conditioning in summer or heating in winter.
That can be true with mild temperatures, but the majority of cases this is not true. It will definitely help improve efficiency of everything, but with increasing air temperatures, isolating a home will just delay the heat transfer (even at night when the outside is cooler). Not to mention the more people and powered devices inside will heat up the home much faster while isolated without any cooling.
This is completely impractical because you have to have doors and windows. Having completely sealed homes with air locks or whatever is just too impractical, too expensive.
Come to INDIA
That only works if you're not in the room. If you're there, the temperature will just start to rise, as you radiate heat yourself (a male human body gives off about 100-120 W of energy while at rest, it can go as high as 300W when exerting yourself). You need to get rid of that heat. If you live in a cold climate, that's easy: just open a window and let cool air flow in. In a hot climate, not so much... (they have thick walls with lots of heat capacity and open the windows at night to cool off the walls and keep the cold in during the day, so it is possible).
However, just having a fat insulation doesn't work. Just ask any fireman who used an asbestos suit before - the suit keeps the fireman cool, but obviously, his body heat can't get out, either...
Im really confortable at high temperatures 30~40C
(I love it) but not everyone does my mom wants to turn the air conditioner and that proves the point that my comment was biased in my temperature taste.
I hate going out in winter mornings 0~10C is almost painfull
Without any electricity will be amazing! Looking forward to it!
If you can get it 42c below ambient you could make a condenser in it and use reverse cycle to cool your house.
9:10 "...not only do we make something cool," no pun intended
Great TED talk, I would love for humans to be able to harness what is referred to as "useless energy".
What he is actually stating is that their material can transform ambient temperature into radiation and send it away. Too good to be true
21st century baby
That's not really an accurate summary of the material. Literally every material "transform[s] ambient temperature into radiation and send[s] it away." The reason that's not useful most of the time is that everything else is also emitting this radiation, so your material will be absorbing this radiation from the things around it, which heats it up by roughly the same amount. The unique part of this particular material is that it's designed to radiate at a temperature that does not get absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere and, instead of absorbing the radiation from everything else, it reflects that radiation. What this means is that it radiates away heat just like any other material, but it doesn't absorb heat like most other materials do.
Stericify, so the material reflects some radiation of surroundings (including air/atmosphere) in a spectrum that the surroundings doesn't absorb (i.e. it still gets heated by the not reflected amount, only slower). In addition the material is heated by convection which equalizes temperature of everything (temperature of air, ground and the material). So the material will have a temperature of surroundings unless you cool the surroundings.
+Oleksandr L; convection is not instantaneous. If it is slow enough an ice cube can still cool you hours later.
AnantaSesaDas, do you mean the material has to be cold beforehand?
I want to give him one million Novel Prize medals. Incredibly splendid!
U deserve a Nobel prize
Brilliant idea from a brilliant mind. Finally a science TED talk
Awesome! How about you open source the science so the rest of us can improve on it?
This reminds me of the material that they came up with to add to our concrete roads and roof tops so it's not a new idea just a new material. I wonder if it's just a reflective material or actually something that refuses to heat up as much as other materials. It almost sounds too good to be true but if it can improve solar and quality of life I hope it takes over our old tech.
This stuff is really life changing for us. I wish you fast progress in this field.
We certainly live in interesting times...
I'm not prone to optimism but I can't help but think that this development may be as influential as the development of Fire, the wheel and plastic.
Amazing
I suppose clouds will block this cooling? Still ideal for deserts.
Not that much. Although they're very good at reflecting sunlight, they let most IR light through.
Luc Buydens: Maybe it would heat up the clouds from below and cause them to precipitate sooner?
Luc Buydens i think the absorption window model of the atmosphere already accounts for humidity and clouds. So i would assume that clouds dont block the radiation
Googled it. Water vapour does absorb IR.
But think about this:
The sky is so much colder than the ground, so we passively radiate heat into the sky and make ourselves colder.
With AC however, we do not radiate our heat out, but generate more heat (electricity) to actively "pull" the heat out. More net heat.
Even if the cloud absorb heat, don't forget the outer space is much colder, so the cloud will radiate some IR out there too.
Also, even in tropical region, on a normal day cloud coverage is only 60-70%.
Here in AZ, I'd give anything to cool down from the sweltering 120°+ summer days
This is incredible- a real breakthrough!
What about just large scale geothermal? That’s far more efficient. During the day or summer you store the heat, at night or winter you recover the heat. Sounds more practical than this, but a fantastic idea non the less.
Why are those panels tilted towards the sun? They would be better positioned pointed straight up, where they would have less atmosphere to radiate heat through.
Could you use this as a moisture condenser? Maybe generating clean fresh water from the air.
This is a great idea! It sounds truly innovative, with the potential to transform all sorts of things we take for granted.
This can work as space camouflage and energy scavengers everywhere.
THIS IS SOOO COOL
(Sry for capslock but I am geeking out a little bit here)
It was invented before humans have borned in Africa. It's called trees.
Trees are good, but they are not the same as this.
Trees absorb a lot of heat from the Sun and need plenty of water.
how is this different than a radiant barrier or space blanket which can reflect away or contain radiant heat? Also, he said that his technology as as mirror to sunlight while reflecting radiant heat. That means if its used to cool solar panels, the panels will be getting less sunlight/power, unless these are placed next to the panels, which means you are losing surface area.
Make ice under the sun! Brilliant
This is brilliant
Hmmm.. some infrared transmissible optical materials, such as zinc selenide, are particularly efficient in the 8-12 micron range. Eventually we might use them to beam excess generated heat directly out into space?.
Does concentrated long term exposure change the way the protective layers of ozone change when using this process. Does the heat escape to space or does it build up and stored at a higher level.
Wow
Well done
Thanks for sharing 😀👍
I'm surprised there were no laughs from the audience when he said "not only did we make something COOL" at 9:10
Very groovy!!
+thunderf00t?
Sabash!
This will be earths come back part one , we need to be proud today coz we have found a big come back for the earth , this is not just and idea this will completely change everything for us and also generate electricity in the night the very same we generate during days and also during the days , this will change everything as we would stop emmitting so much carbon out , buildings designed in such a way that the complete building would have a roof of this material completely covered with huge panels and cool the buildings for free and producing electricity again and again , But what about the water in the panels that will eventually evaporate how do we stop that from evaporating or can we use some kind of gels instead or try to keep the water chambers expandable so that even when they evaporate they still remain in the chamber and keeps turning into ice again and again and with emergency water intake which is precooled with electricity generated with the same panels , does that give any solution or am i right or not , but its a great search , great work brothers
All cars built for hot countries should have this panel for a roof
TED should be more R&D
is it too expensive to make roofing materials with this for tropical climates?
Wonderful
So we should slap infrared paint on everything? Do you have data on this laser shooting cold rays or is 'I touched it' the best data to validate 'We think it can be 42 degrees colder'
00:59
Why not use Wood for house building? For example the Austrian movie archive was rebuilt and was Made out of wood and they need a stable Temperatures but the funny part is they have a cooling system but they never used them only once and only for testing.
Bravo.
My reaction to this title:
"What!? Are our greatest minds really contemplating such things in 2018???"
Man I haven't even watched this yet but this guy has got my attention.
Edit: it's brilliant, absolutely brilliant
now thats a cool invention......
Brilliant
*Best f..ing news* I heard in a long time!! A M A Z I N G !!
excellent
This is so axesome !!!
Give that man a Bells!
Beuatiful, this technology iss very interesting,
i am allways too freaked out by how stupid coolers are designed, especially while groceries shopping.
partly no door that closes the cooled space, sometimes there is a glass door *yay*
i do believe we need to get the cooling motors as well as Aerogel like everywhere :D
thank you for the content briliant
I need to put that on my sunroof.
Had to push the comment section to 667.
Nice presentation wonder if the metamaterial could be added to windows.
this is so cool!
Can it be used all around the house including roof to keep the whole building cool........
Don't agree with the mild summers in Canada, it''s humid and hot AF.
Why not make a "solar panel" that runs on IR light instead of visible light?
Love it
This is like a throwback TED talk before all the pseudo social science took over.
Hashim Warren Which means TED can never be trusted again.
Hashim Warren TEDx was a dear mistake
Mufti Hossain agreed. You have people borrowing credibility from the brand rather than serving the larger audience
Thanks for your input, Russiabot!
Please provide examples of pseudo social science. Or are we just supposed to believe claims without evidence?
Wow this is amazing, this material is literally something you would expect in some sort of sci-fi movie. Thank you and your peers, sir.
We live in a sci-fi world. We have for the last hundred or so years.
kokofan50 I agree as well but if you look at some of the old sci-fi Sy unparallel it to the current tech But I recall the old Star Trek show and see some of the crazy things that they dreamed up that we can see en use now 🤔 back in the seventies they were using white noise experiment and WaLA today in many courthouses they use that very technology and that movie Get Smart with agent 69 Barbara Feldon*YES* en Maxwell Smart and the chief would go into the Dome of Silence kind of like today's Republican elec or appointees? Anyhow Max had a shoe phone that seemed very funny in it's time. Meanwhile other movies of old had projected people both alive or dead appear in space using the current Tech and today we can do that with CO2 gas at night on a building very clearly. But seriously the moon has so much cheese to end world hunger IMAGINE🙄
I've been waiting for this for years now. heard that someone invented a highly efficient cooling system like this 14 years ago and then disappeared.
Tiavor Kuroma TRUE TRUE. AND IT REMINDS ME To Rudolph Von diesel that invented a very efficient internal combustion using hemp that was popular in it's day, that and the guy that works for GM inventing a carb that would be running on 50 plus MPG that disappeared like Rudolph Von diesel while taking a cruise ship and was lost. That was during the Rockefeller years of hoarding all the refineries and the exclusive rights to trains💥
It's not to far off, from some of Isaac Asimov characters in the Foundation series
I'm a refrigeration engineer and I think this technology could have huge potential! Thumbs up!
this will never work
20 years ago, it was said that solar wouldn't work 😜
@Dean Simmons
that never happened.
in the 60's (60 y ago!!!!!!) solar panel were used in remote areas and satellites.
however this will never work... commercially.
Why not?
Refrigeration was invented (and commercially used) over 100 years ago. And a lot of people still don't get the basic principles of that, today.. Maybe you just don't understand..?
A proper TED talk after a long time
I find TED talks good. Not so much the TEDx talks.
So what's been wrong with modern Ted talks?
_occasionally_ you'll find a tedx or ted talk that a. is talking about an 'obvious' and well known concept
b. complete bullshit or only marks importance in a small group of rich people rather than having actual implications for everyone
c. full of fallacies (cough cough psychology/certain forms of feminism)
d. utterly boring
if you want examples i can hook you up, but ted is good overall
This video falls under b: completely useless and bullshit like solar roadways. The thing is only useful in space like they got on the ISS to stop the interior from getting toasty.
i guess the cooling concept would work for solar panels if it leaked & reflected infrared but it didn't reflect visible range light, keeping the panels cooler, i haven't looked into it though very much but its a rough guess
I want this to cool my PC rig.
me too
but you need to put your PC outdoor for the surface to send heat away from your apartment
I swear! This is the first thing that came to my mind.
Oliver Cant what type of semi do you have? 🤓
Maybe cooling pastes may not be required again.
Brilliant! This has so much potential to improve our environment.
Hold up on that, without any figures the efficiency might be so bad that the pollution due to production might overcome any benefits. Not even considering money and payback on investment for an installation...
Very interesting! Now I'm curious to find out which would be more efficient: having cooling panels on the roof that make air conditioning units more efficient or having solar panels on the roof that power less efficient air conditioning units.
According to their website, these panels save the amount of energy 2-3x times the amount of electricity generated by an equal solar panel
By the way he says it, it works both day and night, so it is more effective
This technology is in its infancy,
Solar panels are 4x efficient than this technology
Solar panels take energy from the sun and turns some of it into electricity, then into some other forms of energy but eventually into heat. This system expels heat through the atmosphere. The purpose is completely different.
Solar on the west south and east sides of a roof. Cooling device on the north side.
Isn't it amazing how when you have proper science, instead of propaganda, the comment section is tame. It's almost like all the people leaving bad comment are not trolls, but dissatisfied people.
Did NDT really say that?? That's religious talk if ever I've heard it...
What are you talking about Adam? sounds like poetry
you must have low standards for poetry.
Rickster, I'd say your statement just disproved itself by being propaganda. You are trying to use the nature of this comment section to prove a point about other comment sections. Good going.
Rickster search halfnium then shut up
We need this on the very hot summer days.
Thx dear engineers !
Not that useful!? The ability to create a temperature differential of 150-200 K everywhere on the planet where there is sky is like the most useful thing in the world! Even on the north pole with an average temperature of -30 °C you can create such a differential.
pokenei yes thats precisely what would be great and worth it. If saving energy sounds dumb to you then you may be the dumb one
Just use good old metal mirror, it will deflect more than 90% of solar energy back to space, more efficiently and at microscopic fraction of cost of this material.
This technology needs some electricity input to work, so you can just turn it off.
I live in temperate zone and I would install them for summer to boost efficiency of my AC and/or solar panels and disconnect it during winter why not. The fact that they would cool the surroundings is OK even in winter I think - there is still too much heat anyway.
GIVE THIS MAN MONEY SO HE CAN MAKE IT CHEAPER FOR US
Eren I think it's better to make a company which make buildings so they can built them with this. Di mi kardeşim
Lol
it's a scam...
Sharkiuli lol, everything new to someone or something is scam
Eren yes
Way back in 2009 I also proposed a theoretical design of an heat extractor when I was 18 year old.that can help to extract heat from CO2 and atmosphere to transfer this thermal energy into radiation just by touching hot gas to the black surfaced metal which can emit heat in the form of infrared radiation (as we all know the Kirchoff's law of radiation "Good absorbers are also good emmiters" .
I was proposing this model for an competition called Virgin Earth Challenge (2009 to 2012) I was demoralized by others so I have taken a different path Right Now I am preparing for PhD in Foos Science.And Yes I forgot those days as a bad dream but Now I am happy that someone else is doing the samething😍😍😍😍
we need clothes with that stuff on it asap!!
Like a hat
Genius
God yes! Hope it's not carcinogenic though..
I don't think it would be that effective as clothing or hat. The space station is losing heat the same way but need a lot of surface area to lose even a small amount of heat.
A hat might work, everything else is not pointing enough surface up the air. also it only works outside.
"Can we generate light, from darkness?" that gave me full body chills
i hope they don't wait another decade to support these ideas
you meant lets invest trillions on the idea because it can make our products more desirable, thus making more money.
i would have to rewatch but he said they did it with little to no effort
Senikz, so then why don't you do it if it takes so little effort.
You can always invest in his start up yourself
TGGeko so can you.
Paint cars with this material! They'll be cool without the power hungry air cooling systems!
I like the idea of creating a heat engine using this technology. You'd pretty much have the power of geothermal heating anywhere you want instead of just in geologically active areas.
Now we know why we can't see any alien societies emitting thermal energy.
Only infra-red light (heat) of a certain wavelength will pass through the air with such a relatively low resistance. As for alien worlds producing artificial heat, that frequency might be the only one to escape from their atmosphere, even through cloud cover.