Cooling with the sun

Can you cool with waste heat? Sure. A Swiss research project involving Empa, which ended in November, demonstrated this in an impressive way. Now a large-scale EU project is starting: industrial cooling - thanks to the Spanish sun. Every now and so often heating something up is unavoidable. Potato soup or risotto, tomato sauce or chocolate pudding - all unfeasible without heat. A small proportion of the heat ends up in the stomach, while the remaining majority (inadvertently) warms the surroundings. If we think outside the kitchen, we soon spot the next waste heat suspects: If our laptop gets that warm, just imagine how much more heat an internet provider's server park must produce. We like to have hot showers and let the warm water go down the drain; it's exactly the same story at the launderette around the corner. Then we head out the door and start our car: Its engine converts more than three quarters of the energy contained in gasoline into (waste) heat - and only the smaller proportion into the desired propulsion. Thus far, all this thermal energy has been lost. This is now bound to change. A pan-European research consortium is starting to "collect" waste heat. A team from Empa is also on board. Matthias Koebel first became interested in collecting heat through the THRIVE project ("Thermally driven adsorption heat pumps for substitution of electricity and fossil fuels"), a Swiss research project initiated by IBM Research Zurich. The lab in Rüschlikon asked itself a simple question: Can anything useful be done with the vast amount of waste heat from a large computer center?