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STORRS, CT — A University of Connecticut researcher is making summertime camping a little cooler.
And in involves — ahem — real camping, not a luxury recreational vehicle.
UConn’s Al Kasani, while working with Technology Commercialization Services and the university’s Center for Clean Energy Engineering, has developed a new “off-grid technology” that allows a tent’s internal temperature to cool up to 20-degree Fahrenheit below the ambient temperature.
The tent requires just one external element to function and it’s usually readily available at most campsites — water. IN the technology, a gallon of water can “power” the tent’s cooling system for up to 24 hours, UConn officials said.
Kasani compared the technology to plants wicking water from the ground and then sweating it out to cool themselves while getting the required energy from the sun.
“What I did was simply to find a material that could do the same job,” Kasani said.
Kasani’s technology involves a “proprietary fabric” that wicks water from a reservoir through the surface area of the tent, leading to “an electricity-free temperature decrease far more substantial than existing cooling technologies.”
The tent’s lightweight fabric makes it “packable and far more portable” than electric fans, and its cooling system is “powered” by “endlessly repeatable reactions between water and titanium nanoparticles,” Kasani said.
Industry interest in Kasani’s technology has been high, according to Technology Commercialization Services, which assists researchers in commercializing innovations into products “that benefit society and fuel economic development.”
The market includes both recreational camping and the military, officials said.
See more about the innovation on the UConn Today site.
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