The ThermoHelioDome has been winterized to prevent the bulbs from freezing by using a hot water heater to provide heat to circulating water. Track the performance of the dome’s heater here and the mean radiant temperature here. Eventually, the entire sensor network will be posted online.

The NY Times ran an interesting article on thermal imaging, a tool we use in our research to study how heat moves in and out of surfaces. It gives a nice overview of the technology, as well as some interesting application and business models (like essess.com)

Welcome to the new Princeton CHAOS Lab website!

Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems

Research Group of Dr. Forrest Meggers,
Asst. Prof. at the School of Architecture &
Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

Please add suggestions for content!

The group fo Shanhui Fan published a paper in Nature, “Passive radiative cooling below ambient air temperature under direct sunlight.” I demonstrates how a nanostructured surface and shift the wavelength of radiant emission into a band where the atmosphere is transparent, greatly increasing the thermal gradient and cooling potential by radiating to the sky. They were able to cool the surface to 4.9 degrees C below the ambient air temperature in sunlit conditions.

Nature paper:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v515/n7528/full/nature13883.html

Media article:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141126133821.htm

Meggers’ featured lecture at Ohio State

http://knowlton.osu.edu/event/forrest-meggers-princeton-university-school-architecture

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S41/53/01G71/index.xml?section=topstories

Watch all aspects of our radiant cooling dome construction, from robot foam fabrication and hot wire cutting to truck rigging and gorilla gluing. At the end, check out the in-house design for mean radiant temperature sensing and the wet-bulb temperature depression through the cooling reflected by the dome’s dishes, viewed in the IR spectrum.

Read more about the ThermoHeliDome.

Read more about CHAOS and Infrared Sensing in Campus as a Lab.

University news page (was featured on main page in September

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S40/80/41I98/index.xml

University Bulletin newspaper print

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/bulletin/docs/Bulletin_10-09-2014.pdf