This Sweating Rooftop Sounds Like a Terrible Idea
A team of researchers at ETH Zurich has developed a rooftop mat made of a five-millimeter-thick polymer that can absorb water when it rains. The material changes properties along with the temperature—the mat becomes hydrophobic as it warms up, and the water is expelled, extracting heat from the building in a process the researchers compare to human sweat. The idea is to cool the interior with less reliance on air conditioning. It's hard to imagine how this is possibly going to work. The basic physics and thermodynamics of the plan are sound—water can transfer heat as it evaporates. But roofs, for the past several hundred years, have been designed to shed water. Absorbing it and just holding it there against the building exterior is, in conventional building practice, the last thing you want a roof to do. Look, the team in Switzerland is surely a smart group of folks. And energy-saving revolutions in building practices are always exciting. Here are a few questions the t...