Simple, affordable evaporative cooler to reduce food loss in developing countries

Collarin, Federico; Conte, Antonietta; Marasca, Francesca; Mascolo, Luigi; Massa, Leonardo; Mutti, Fabio; Sposato, Maria Teresa

doi:10.23726/cij.2019.881

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…The material and shape of the chamber have been addressed, showing their effect on temperature drop and food preservation [6,[11][12][13][14]17,18,23,26]. Experimental studies give ideas for materials [5,8,14,21,[27][28][29], and some of them address issues of implementation.…”

Section: Soil As a Construction Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In developing countries, mainly in remote areas, the difficulties increase, and it is necessary to facilitate the deployment using low-cost, abundant, and/or cost-free materials that are locally available and culturally accepted [28,30]. In Vala's review, most of the proposed ECs have brick walls, while some are made of metal or wood, with just one unit reportedly made of clay [19] on the very small scale of 0.6 × 0.52 × 0.85 m. Soil/clay is a great opportunity to build evaporative coolers [21,26,29,31] because of its hygroscopicity; it can be found everywhere, and is mostly free.…”

Section: Soil As a Construction Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Implementation and Performance Evaluation of a Community-Scale Adobe Evaporative Cooling Chamber for Vegetable Preservation

Davalo,

Yuba,

Pinto

2023

Buildings

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The construction of evaporative coolers in remote areas can increase the longevity of vegetables, improving food security and the local economy of small farmers in remote, impoverished communities without access to electricity. This work presents a 1:1 scale prototype of an 8 m3 (2.1 × 2.1 × 2.3 m) stabilized adobe evaporative cooler, with a design based on the appropriate technology framework, and it was built as a chamber using double adobe walls, filled with wet sand, to induce evaporative cooling. Furthermore, the paper presents the prototype’s performance evaluation. The tests were carried out in the dry and wet states, with different volumes of water. The results show good performance compared with other prototypes, although the optimum watering volume could not be determined because of the high climate variance (outside temperature and humidity) that prevented the repetition of the experiments in identical operating conditions. Stabilized adobe proved to be a good choice for use in the cooler, even when subject to moisture accumulation, indicating an estimated long lifetime for the cooler. The data obtained about the efficiency of evaporative cooling show that the cooler, as expected, has its best performance on the hottest and driest days, reducing the internal temperature (up to 13.24 °C) and managing to keep the internal humidity. The cost, efficiency, durability, and replicability make the proposed evaporative cooler a feasible solution for food preservation.

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