Cooling performance of bio-mimic perspiration by temperature-sensitive hydrogel

A novel passive cooling solution, Bio-mimic Perspiration Cooling (BP-Cooling), was recently proposed, which mimics the thermoregulation mechanism of living creatures to supply extra passive cooling on demand using an intelligent skin made from temperature sensitive hydrogel (TSHG). In this paper, the heat and mass transfer characteristics of BP-Cooling are investigated. The temperature and humidity fields of BP-Cooling are measured by the Twyman-Green interference technique and modeled by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The validated CFD model is further used to study the impacts of different usage conditions, e.g. ambient temperature, ambient humidity, and the starting temperature of BP-Cooling, on the BP-Cooling performance. Results show that BP-Cooling can improve passive cooling performance up to twenty times above natural convection and may be powerful enough to enable next-generation mobile phones perform like personal computers in a wide design envelope.