2024 - The benefits and beauty of sunlight

Category
Daylight in Buildings - Region 2: Eastern Europe and The Middle East

Students
Karagulyan Elina

Teacher
Valeri Gruarch

School
Payame Noor University

Country
Iran

Light is a multifunctional phenomenon. How can you combine aesthetic and useful functions in one building? The museum project is an answer to this question. This project is proposed to be built in Dubai because it is one of the leading Arab countries with a lot of sunshine.

Recently, an experimental setup was developed at the Saudi Arabian University of Science and Technology (KAUST). It uses the natural phenomenon of “phase change” in which energy is absorbed when salt crystals dissolve in water. This means that if you add salt to warm water, it will quickly cool as the salt dissolves. In this way, it is possible to cool large rooms using only salt, sun, and water and a minimum of electricity to circulate the water and supply the salt.

System:

Fresh water is supplied to the cooling column from above and at the same time special salt is automatically supplied;

As the salt crystals dissolve, the water cools and transfers the cold to the surface of the glass, which then cools the air in the room;

Salt water has a higher density than fresh water, so it falls down, where it flows through a system of pipes into the central reservoir in the atrium;

In the central atrium, water, under the influence of sunlight passing through the light guide, heats up and evaporates. Then the evaporated water is condensed and fed back into the column.

In addition to cooling, the column is used as a source of diffused light inside the building. For this purpose, Velux products were used in the project, namely solar tunnels.