Let’s face it, summer is no longer a season. You walk outside for two seconds, and suddenly you look like a melted candle. You run inside, crank up the AC, and then immediately pass out when you see your electricity bill, but what if you could freeze your room, keep your food fresh and completely ghost your power company.
NESCOD the new cooling system invented by absolute geniuses at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. This system provides icy cold relief in extreme desert heat using exactly zero watts of electricity.
No plugs. No wires. No fainting when the utility bill arrives.
If you think cooling requires a loud, vibrating box sticking out of your window, NESCOD is about to blow your mind. It doesn’t use compressors, it uses chemistry. Specifically, it uses a process called endothermic dissolution. It’s the ultimate science fair hack. The system takes a specific type of salt, ammonium nitrate (which is super cheap and widely used in fertilizers) and dissolves it in water. When this salt dissolves, it gets incredibly hungry for energy. It violently sucks the heat right out of the surrounding environment just to break its own chemical bonds. The result. The liquid’s temperature plummets instantly. According to the research published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, this process pumps out up to 191 watts of cooling power per square meter. That’s enough to keep temperatures between a crisp 5°C and 15°C (41°F to 59°F). Basically, it turns your room into a refrigerator using a salt shaker and a splash of water. In lab tests, the system has demonstrated the ability to drop temperatures significantly bringing water from 77°F down to 38°F in just 20 minutes.
Now, you’re probably thinking, okay, smart guy. Once the salt dissolves, the trick is over. Do I have to buy new salt every day? Nope. This is where the Saudi scientists built a 3D solar regenerator. When the system finishes cooling, it uses the blazing heat of the sun to evaporate the water. As the water turns into vapor, the ammonium nitrate crystallizes back into its original solid salt form. It’s a perfect, infinite loop and because the cooling phase and the recharging phase happen separately, you can store the cooling power and use it whenever you want even in the middle of the night.
NESCOD is also a secret water purifier.
When the sun evaporates the water trapped during the recharge cycle, the vapor condenses back into liquid. The resulting water is so pure that its impurity levels are below 1 part per million (ppm). In dry, desert areas, this system doesn't just keep you cool, it purifies your water supply. While we all want cheaper AC, NESCOD is a lifesaver for millions of people in Yemen and other underdeveloped countries.
Millions of people live in Yemen with zero electricity or unreliable power grids. NESCOD can keep medicine and food cold without needing a single solar panel or generator.
Remote regions and disaster zones usually rely on loud, polluting diesel generators to run refrigerators. NESCOD completely gets rid of the need for diesel and because ammonium nitrate is already mass produced globally for agriculture, the materials are incredibly cheap. Combined with the low cost 3D structure of the system, it’s highly scalable for developing nations.
While we might still be a little ways away from buying a NESCOD unit at our local hardware store, the future of staying cool looks bright and incredibly cheap. Goodbye, expensive electric bills. Hello, cold powered salt conditioner.
سبحانك اللهم وبحمدك أشهد ان لا اله الا انت استغفرك وأتوب اليك