3D-Printed porous Cubes Can Cool Your Home and outdoors Without Any Air Conditioning

Amazing stuff!

"Austrian researchers 3D-printed porous ceramic cubes that soak up water and cool a room as it evaporates with no electricity required. In a hot attic test, they dropped the temperature nearly 13 degrees."

"... an energy-efficient solution to urban heat islands: 3D-printed cubes made from highly porous ceramics, combining centuries-old knowledge of passive cooling with state-of-the-art additive manufacturing. The ceramic cubes are suitable for cooling both indoor spaces and ambient air outside.

The cubes make use of a physical principle that is particularly well known in hot and dry regions of the world: evaporative cooling. When water evaporates, it absorbs heat from its surroundings and the air cools down. ..."

Tuesday, September 29, 2026 - Join The Flyover

New 3D-Printed Cubes Can Cool Your Home Without Any Air Conditioning

TU Graz Develops a Cooling Ceramic Wall to Combat Urban Heat (original news release) "Porous ceramic cubes produced by a 3D printer utilise energy-efficient evaporative cooling and significantly lower the temperature. A prototype of the cooling wall made from ceramic cubes is already on display on the TU Graz campus."

The lady is holding one of these cooling cubes. In the background, the wall with seating is a demonstration of this new technology in a public space.

Europeans are using a lot more air conditioning recently

Good news! Let cooler heads prevail! Just kidding!

Is it climate change or increased human sensitivity to warm temperatures (e.g. aging population etc.)?

"... The amount of energy used for household cooling in the EU has doubled since 2018, though from a low base.

In 2020, American households used around 914,000 terajoules to power air conditioning, compared to just 45,000 in Europe.

Chinese air-conditioner exports to the EU reached a record $3.76 billion in the first half of 2026, up 43 percent from a year earlier."

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup - by Malcolm Cochran

Heatwave suffering Europe Looks to a more Air-Conditioned Future

About time! How much of this low residential A/C usage in Europe is due to the climate change ideology and demagoguery? 

"Air conditioning usage is rapidly growing across Europe, as intensifying heat waves strain infrastructure built for cooler climates.

~20% of European homes have AC units; but adoption is expanding even in historically cooler countries like the 

U.K., where homes with AC doubled over the past three years [from a very low level I suspect]; and 

Germany, where AC adoption jumped 6% between 2023–2024.  

Prioritizing health care: Britain’s Climate Change Committee warned that air conditioning is becoming urgently needed in hospitals. This week, medical machines broke down in sweltering UK hospital wards even as heat-related admissions surged.   

The cost of cooling: Higher electricity prices and aging power grids make widespread AC adoption especially challenge ..."

Global Health NOW: Pakistan’s Pediatric HIV Outbreak; and Overheated Europe Looks to an Air-Conditioned Future

A pure radiant cooling Device provides air conditioning without conditioning air

Good news! I write this blog post while our very old A/C is humming!

But this is so far only a proof of concept and a prototype!

"Researchers have made a cooling device that they say can chill environments with 50% of the energy used by conventional air conditioning.

They are using the physics of radiative cooling. ...

But it’s difficult to make them powerful enough, and hard to stop water in the atmosphere condensing on the surface of these cooling devices (like it does on a glass of cold water), lowering their performance further.

This research team ... developed a prototype radiant cooling device that could overcome these problems.

Their device uses a thermoelectric cooling module, which they describe as “in essence, a heat pump”, connected to 4 pipes and a fan on one side, and an aluminium panel on the other.

While the pipes and fan act as a heat sink, the aluminium panel is used to make a radiant surface extremely cold.

The researchers tested their device on a human skin simulator, and found it was able to cool the simulator by 7.3°C. ..."

From the highlights and abstract:

"Highlights

• A pure radiant cooling device for personalized thermal management

• A proof-of-concept prototype with thermoelectric cooler and polyethylene films

• Breakthrough in radiant cooling energy density (RCED) of up to 220 W/m2

• Energy saving ratio up to 50.4% in a typical building environment in summer

Summary

Ever since the birth of the first air conditioner (Carrier air conditioner) in 1902, over one hundred years ago, it has been accompanied by several technical problems, e.g.,
(1) low energy efficiency in large open spaces,
(2) spread of pollutants, airborne pandemic transmission (e.g., severe acute respiratory syndrome [SARS], COVID-19) through air-conditioning systems, and (3) low comfort caused by fan noise and blowing sounds.
Here, we report a personalized pure radiant cooling device that decouples the fresh air supply from space cooling to achieve air conditioning without conditioning the air. Condensation-free radiant cooling with a radiant cooling capacity of 152 W/m2 is achieved with a polyethylene (PE) film-covered super-cold infrared-emissive surface. By optimizing the design and operation parameters, the device saves up to 50.4% of cooling energy in a typical summer building environment. Our concept opens up the possibility of pandemic-free personalized thermal management with high energy efficiency and thermal comfort."

Device provides air conditioning without conditioning air

A pure radiant cooling device for “air conditioning” without conditioning air (open access)

Graphical abstract

Cooling homes without warming the planet

Recommendable! Are you ready for a more energy-efficient air conditioner? We need more energy supply like nuclear power!

"As incomes in developing countries continue to rise, demand for air conditioners is expected to triple by 2050. ... Air conditioning is currently responsible for almost 20 percent of electricity use in buildings around the world. ...
“The thing about air conditioning is the basic technology hasn't changed much since it was invented 100 years ago,” ...
a class of highly porous materials called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs, that passively pull moisture from the air as the machine works. ...
MOF’s intriguing properties come from their large internal surface area [like activated carbon] and the ability to finely tune the size of the tiny chambers that run through them. ...
Transaera’s MOFs passively collect moisture as air enters the system. The machine’s waste heat is then used to dry the MOF material for continuous reuse. ..."

Cooling homes without warming the planet | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology The startup Transaera is using a class of materials, advanced by MIT Professor Mircea Dinca for over a decade, to create a more energy-efficient air conditioner.

Will caloric materials innovate air conditioning?

Is this just hot air or wishful thinking by the usual climate change fanatics or are we about to witness a major advance?

One thing seems to be for certain, the global demand for air conditioning is rising significantly because of improved economic prosperity in many parts of the world.

"[Researchers] placed plastic crystals of neopentyl glycol—a common chemical used to produce paints and lubricants—into a chamber, added oil, and cranked down a piston. As the fluid compressed and applied pressure, the temperature of the crystals rose by around 40 ˚C.

It was the largest temperature shift ever recorded from placing materials under pressure, at least when the findings were published in a Nature Communications paper last year. And alleviating the pressure has the opposite effect, cooling the crystals dramatically. ...
In addition to reducing the need for hydrofluorocarbons, the hope is the technology could eventually be more energy efficient than standard cooling devices, given the heat released relative to the amount of energy needed to drive the change."

How materials you’ve never heard of could clean up air conditioning | MIT Technology Review

Here is similar research into magnetocaloric materials referenced in the above article:

Caloric materials for cooling and heating | Science