Yakhchal: Ancient Refrigerators (2009)

Agreed. Similarly, when I learned of the Indian technique of stepwall evaporative cooling, I was shocked that something so misleadingly simple could have been derived so long ago.

https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/architect-uses...

But, of course people back then weren't any less intelligent, they simply didn't have as much knowledge, probably due to the inefficiency of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another without the use of digital technologies.

If anyone is at all interested in ancient (or even just modestly old) cooling techniques, 99 Percent Invisible had a particularly great episode in "Thermal Delight"

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/

>annoying about pop archaeology

"HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY HAVE MOVED THIS!?!?!"

Many paragraphs or commercials later:

"Ok they just put it on top of some logs and rolled it..."

Evaporative cooling plus the fact it freezes at night, and they have a system for transferring melted run off to the outside to refreeze.

Being originally from a hot, HUMID climate, I find these articles so exasperating. It can get to 85 degrees at night where I was born. So thanks, thanks for the mystic knowledge of the ancients, but it's central and a fridgedair for me.

Half the articles are trying to stop people from using cooling compressors, and discuss the limitations in passing.

For a very well written and detailed description of the principle of evaporative cooling, you can’t beat Feynman.

Section 1-3

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html

Most of the article is pulled word for word from the Wiki you linked.

Thank you. Came to comments to find this out.

Evaporative cooling is a very powerful technique, but does not work quite well at small scales.

I'm also fascinated by this. I've read about a similar setup where instead of a windcatcher driving the airflow it's wood being burnt near the top of the air channel. I can't recall who used this though. If anyone has some keywords or links, I would appreciate it.

I was recently reading about solar chimneys, which is a somewhat similar idea, but driven by heat from the sun rather than wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney

Thank you, I could not find an intuitive explanation anywhere.

Thanks! I've been playing with science education content around temperature. 'The universe was once as bright hot as the Sun, but it's been expanding, and is now dark cold. So very cold. The Sun is still bright hot. So very hot. In between, the Earth spins, mixing too hot and too cold. The atmosphere shades us from the hot Sun, and insulates us from the dark cold. Ground and water [buffer the night]. If Earth was much further from the Sun [atmosphere becomes a few feet of snow].' And so on [closer to Sun; non-spinning and Mercury; no atmosphere and lunar temps; more atmosphere and Venus; less buffered desert; etc]. Sort of using a story frame of Sun vs space for teaching temperature in primary school. Raman's work ties in nicely.

I read an article on this topic about a month ago, but I can't find it now.

In short, cheap energy in the post-war US meant that mechanical heating and cooling were affordable. Builders moved away from a vernacular architecture style, which had adapted to the local environment, to a more standardized style that was cheaper to make.

While it didn't cover this detail, I think another aspect was that many people decided to move to other parts of the country, and wanted the architecture of where they came from. For example, people from the NE who moved to the desert SW and wanted a Cape Cod bungalow-style house.

The vernacular architecture in the SW is for thick adobe walls and small windows. The walls are thick enough that it takes 12 hours for the heat of the day to reach the interior, and help keep it warm during the cold nights. While it's a better fit to the local weather, it's also more expensive to build than a stick-built home + insulation + A/C and heating systems. (Traditional adobe can be built using local mud, but that needs yearly maintenance, because the rains will wash it away.)

Well evaporative cooling, and ground-source energy similar to this does get used in modern architecture. Cooling towers are used to evaporatively cool waste heat from the circulating water in HVAC systems. Thermal labryinths, or earth ducts directly transfer heat to and from the earth, ground source heat pumps do as well through refrigerant loops.

They work much better in dry climates that cool down massively at night, and require that digging that far into the ground doesn't make you hit the water table.