HIDE-Pods: Hydrogel Intelligent Diffusion and Evaporative-cooling Pods

The evaporative-cooling membrane for the large-scale downdraft cooling chimney is composed of a series of interconnected hydrogel sacks. A stretchable lightweight mesh serves as the hydrogel retention fabric. The design takes advantage of maximizing the surface area for the saturated hydrogels to increase moisture-release effectiveness. The size of the pods increase when fully saturated and decrease when drying out. Embedded gravimetric sensors serve as indicators for actuating the peristaltic pumps (divided into four quadrants for the array).

Collabroator: Dorit Aviv (UPenn)