Context and challenges: Facade-integrated evaporative cooling offers a pathway to high heat rejection for buildings with limited rooftop area. However, it needs to operate under fixed footprint and parasitic power constraints, requiring surface enhancement strategies that enable more efficient heat removal.
Approach and objective: We develop a fan-power-constrained conjugate heat-mass transfer framework to evaluate facade-integrable evaporative macrochannels. We show that hydrogel-only pin fins enhance evaporation into channels but provide little increase in base heat removal due to high internal thermal conduction resistance. Experimentally, we are developing a Hydrogel Overlayer on Metal Scaffold (HOMeS) architecture that separates heat spreading and capillary wetting across pore scales. Our Bayesian optimization identifies near-optimal pin-fin geometries, which, for a 200 × 200 mm panel at a fan power density of 125 Wm−2, deliver ~7 × higher base heat removal than a flat evaporating channel.
If you plan to do a semester/thesis project on this:
What we expect:
– Background in thermodynamics or heat and mass transfer is preferred
– Basic programming and data analysis skills (e.g. Python, MATLAB)
What you will learn:
– Experience in material synthesis and characterization
– Design of cooling experiments and data analysis
– Scientific communications in the lab
Contact: Gautier Rouaze ([email protected])
Related article: npj Therm. Sci. Eng.1, 19 (2026).