Performance of textile and building materials for a particular evaporative cooling purpose

High energy demand associated to the massive use of air conditioning systems requires careful consideration of passive cooling strategies, with evaporative cooling being recognized as a useful possibility for that purpose. One important factor that influences the performance of evaporative cooling systems is the media material that supports water evaporation process. In this work evaporative cooling capabilities of different building and textile materials were experimentally determined. The major purpose of the study was to select an evaporative cooling material to be used in a more complex passive cooling unit under research development. A test tunnel was constructed for this particular work and the behavior of several samples was analyzed. Results show that among the studied materials a polyester spacer fabric with honeycomb structure presents best performance.