Advancing Thermodynamic Architecture

Current architecture doesn’t consider the thermal opportunities for buildings, not only areas of high solar gain, but more important in a desert where to draw cold from and to store this for use during the day. Thermal fluids store therms, units of heat or cold, at twice the capacity of water, specific heat of 1.0, standard thermal fluids are 2.0 or twice the thermal storage capacity, don’t freeze until -43C/-45F, haven’t quite started to boil at 300C/600F.

So, to keep a home cool in summer, areas of lower temperatures can be used as a source of cold to store it, using insulated pipettes to move thermal energy from source to room. Cooling power can be obtained using ice-house ammonia refrigeration systems, the propane refrigerator of the rural past uses this system which takes heat to produce the changes for creating cold. This heat is quite easy to get from a dish solar collector, cloudy climates using more collector area than the Sonoran Desert.

Then, with some insulated tanks and thermal fluids, an entirely solar-powered space heating and cooling system is straightforward to produce. This moves the major power demand of the house off the grid, using solar-thermal instead of electricity gains orders of magnitude in efficiency over the grid system, no energy transformations are required in the solar-powered system, the heat or cold is used as-is, very little waste heat is created so minimal impact on global warming versus the grid, no contest.

To remove space heating and cooling at the residence eliminates outside power inputs and makes using PV’s, photo-voltaics, able to produce the electricity in a more practical way, being able to store enough in reasonably sized battery arrays to maintain for the daily cycle.

The residence still has these thermal needs to handle: Hot water and heat for laundry and cooking. A way to supply these with natural energy systems is to store 300C/600F during the day, that’s enough to burn the bacon, have instant boiling water on tap and other features not as easily available to electricity or gas. This concept requires a new series of product lines of appliances that will on the outside look identical to existing ones, the difference being the use of a thermal fluid to cook, heat or dry something, or, having the cooling power to refrigerate and make ice.

This then frees the PV-battery system from all thermal needs for the home including major appliances, so much so that having the battery capacity to run electronics, small appliances and lighting becomes very practical, thus the home can be totally off the grid and constructed having an identical look to existing homes if desired.

There is no reason to have a wire to the grid, the use of thermal energy directly doesn’t involve electricity, there’s no economic reason for a homeowner to put up more PV’s than they need just to spin the dial for a few bucks, and, if you’re not on the grid they can’t bill you. A homeowner is far greener with a diesel generator run on biodiesel for big ampere needs like running shop equipment, PV-battery systems are not good for high amps, so this is considered in the home, with the engine’s exhaust heat co-generated into the thermal system of the home.

A need in industrial design is a recognition, then, of the need to engineer all these methods and products. A major system needing full-cycle design is what goes into the sewer, all of that “waste” is a source of nutrition to grow the biomass to produce biodiesel with, this worth about 3-gallons a day per person in the home, thus supplying a transportation fuel by living in the home, a miniaturized version of the centralized supply process.

A personal note, without exception everyone the designer has described this to wants one of these homes!

So, the market for them is there, homeowners are fed up with captive-market, parasitic capitalism where every watt adds to the profit of others and you don’t get a dime’s worth of value for a buck. Current pond-algae biodiesel sells for $1.75/gallon in California local to where it’s made in biodiesel stations, this product pollutes the planet 40% of what gas-ethanol does, 60% is a big reduction in harmful emissions, and the fuel is made from “waste”.

The waste-stream includes solids, and if exploited by technology instead of ignored can produce other useful oils that have market value. At the end, the pressed cakes are rich, organic soil amendments that help the idea of self-sufficiency in food on any lot by digging them in, enhancing soil and plant growth, and, the waste processing purifies the water as the biomass extracts the nutrients, treated at the end and recycled water becomes another self-sustaining possibility if you have the systems in the home to purify and recycle onsite, the building design capturing run-off.

While the technology is wanting, centralized systems that perform these processes are straightforward steps to follow, miniaturizing them and engineering in adequate self-maintenance such that taking care of the system is akin to keeping a pool’s water balanced and clean is the goal for simplicity. In any case if this is done then much of the food required by the residents can be put in as crops, intentionally designed into the buildings and site, with all of these design criteria satisfied the residence becomes a refuge of a most fundamental kind, a residence with the maximum real value in a home.

It’s a change from a burden that taxes the wealth of the nation, allowing that value tax to be the profit basis for a parasitic form of capitalism, compare that to a real home, a refuge from the world where the basics of living are provided by the far more sustainable, full-cycle engineering and design these homes represent.

My designs incorporate all of these features, they bring together thermodynamics and common sense using the daily solar cycle to gain the heat, cold and electricity needed, storing directly heat and cold in thermal fluids, they require no conversion of power so are very efficient thermodynamically, and by removing all thermal needs from using electricity, PV-battery systems become very practical in terms of how many amp-hours of storage are needed in batteries, a generator for intermittent heavy current loads ends any dependence on the grid using a direct generation of the power and not steam as a method whose theoretically maximum efficiency is then onl’y 40% of the heat used to boil the water to dry steam, so on that alone natural systems are over twice as efficient as using grid power unless co-generation is used to capture and use that waste heat at the power plant, requiring piping to end uses, in the world there are very few power plants using co-generation so it’s not statistically significant on the grid.

The structural design of my buildings is composite, with the primary method using contemporary concrete and foam wall systems, adjusting the position or thickness of the insulation or wall width to adjust how much thermal-mass stores energy for maintaining the comfort zone with the least energy inputs for the design temperature differential, a principle demonstrated by some adobe homes that stay cool all summer without air conditioning. This simple construction system can then be adjusted to any room’s needs, a thermal transfer built-in to move the heat-cold from sources to rooms that by locations require inputs.

Thus, the home is built using a thermal view, choosing concrete over wood to leverage the thermal-mass to advantage where a wooden home can’t in order to maintain the comfort zone with the least energy. The advancement of these strategies will bring new economies based on a high value in return for the capital investment in a home, versus today where homes of any price have very little real value because they require so many external energy inputs, mainly due to housing having become a money game, something having nothing to do with creating a self-sufficient refuge, a home that is engineered to give a fair deal. Instead, homes are a rip-off, pay-by-the-watt economy that is best described as parasitic, if not horrendously inefficient from a thermodynamic view where entropy rules what happens, lose it and it’s lost when it comes to heat or cold, you never get it back again.

Current research is focused on roof and ceiling systems, the transfer of heat build-up in these a most important thermal source to recycle within the structure. The high differential in temperature is part of keeping the comfort zone without using much energy. Also, using forced-air is about 13-times less efficient than using a fluid to move thermal energy around, hence the growing popularity of “ductless” systems and the use of fluids in these designs.

Another important facet considered is how simple thermal fluid flow is to understand and use, like electricity, a diode ó one-way valve, power ó thermal expansion. From this analogy comes the relationship of expansion to flow, this natural consequence of a temperature differential allows passive transfer of the energy, few pumps are needed in complete systems, recent research is on designing “flow amplifiers”, using solid-state power harvesting techniques?

The variety of processes and methods needed to construct one of these “habitat” or “refugia” homes is not a big list of unknown technologies, yet remains rather much unfunded, obviously the antithesis of current captive-market, parasitic energy-for-profit games.

Therefore, an intent of this paper is to challenge the AIA and engineers involved in architecture to use and apply thermodynamics to structures such that thermal energy is never supplied by electricity, using direct inputs of sunlight or solar-thermal transfer for a building’s thermal needs instead of converting electricity for a thermal end use.

Hopefully all this will spark debate and create actions that lead to a more unbiased assessment of the actual profit to society of wasting so many precious non-renewable resources pall mall until there’s literally nothing left, why not look ahead and profit from the move to a sustainable design agenda and funding climate? The principles, methods, processes and strategies described reveal an integrated look at architecture, a thermal analysis so blatantly missing from current design standards.