Cooling London's Tube Trains With Ice
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06. 5.07
It gets hot in the London tube, and the trains aren't air conditioned. The trains barely fit in the tunnels so they can't bolt units on top, and since conventional air conditioners just move heat from one place to another, there is concern that putting them in trains would just make the tubes themselves hotter. Four years ago they even had a £100,000 competition for ideas to cool the trains; Julian Burgess', shown above, looks attractive.
Now they are going to try a quaint, 19th century idea: blowing air over blocks of ice mounted under the cars. 21st century twist: Refrigeration units will make the ice while the trains are outdoors, and let it melt while they are in the tunnels, cooling the occupants without warming the tunnels. The ice is acting as a kind of thermal storage battery. Downside: a lot of extra weight and extra energy to move it. ::Guardian and ::Daily Mail
More weight and energy, but if it makes the use of public transport a more pleasant (or in some cases perhaps less unpleasant) experience, thus resulting in increased use, then maybe it will be worth it - and result in a net reduction in energy use for transportation in the area.
kind of bizarre to me that they havent yet devised a way to harvest all that heat for conversion to electricity somehow, e.g. as is done in combined cycle power plants, or even just some kind of passive ventilation system connecting Tube with surface, engineered to take advantage of the air pressure difference to blow out the hot air and spin generator-connected rotors in the process...
wonder what i'm missing here.
they could also try to harvest the powerful energy of the underground's smell...
I don't get why this isn't simple. The Underground is underground, right? Where the temperature is roughly 50F all year round? So dig some sideways (or downwards) tunnels, a few chimneys and a fan. Problem solved.
there's an idea - switch off the heating.
Couldn't sit down on one of the trains of District line a few days ago. The under seat heater was full on. Sunny June.
in the middle ages, they had special cellars under castles where they would store ice,
taken from frozen lakes in winter.
this way, because of the sheer wass of ice stored,
they had a refrigirator over the summer in the cellar one could say.
what if one would seperate the ice of a river flowing through town,
store that in some isolated storage, use this to cool air in summer.
(yes through heatexchangers, otherwise moist/smelly/germs in the air)
Just searching for my own name and found the picture I made. Good article, shame I didn't get the £100,000.
Heat rises, so give the underground higher ceilings.