Thanks to their fur, camels don’t sweat quickly, and they don’t easily run out of water. This is why these animals last long in the scorching desert. Inspired by this scientific fact, engineer Jeffery Grossman wondered if he could imitate the camel’s sweat glands and the insulating fur. As it turns out, he could, and the result is this new technology which “could be used to keep food and medical supplies chilled without requiring additional energy.”
For the bottom layer of the camel-inspired system, Grossman used hydrogel, a highly absorbent network of polymers that is super-charged with water. As water evaporates from hydrogel, the liquid cools the surface it’s on. The top layer Grossman created was composed of aerogel, a hydrophobic silica structure filled with tiny pores that make the material more than 90 percent air—earning the substance the title of “the world’s lightest solid.” Aerogel acts like the camel’s fur, insulating the hydrogel from warmer ambient temperature and slowing water evaporation for sustained cooling power.
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To measure how the two-layer approach performed, Grossman and his team placed a heat sensor beneath the layers and placed the system in a humidity and temperature-controlled chamber. The sensor monitored the temperature beneath the hydrogel over time as liquid evaporated into the 86-degrees Fahrenheit chamber. The team compared their camel-inspired creation to a single layer of uncovered hydrogel. The two-layer system dropped the temperature near that of the hydrogel alone, but the duel layer kept that cooling power for much longer. Grossman found that the layered materials extended cooling time by 400 percent.
Learn more details about Grossman’s system over at Smithsonian Magazine.
Now that’s literally cool.
(Image Credit: Manuela_Burkhalter/ Pixabay)