The principle of science, referred to as evaporative cool, may change the game for conserving produce and other vegetables cultivated on small-scale farms where the drying temperatures can rapidly degrade newly harvested crops. If freshly harvested fresh greens and red peppers aren’t consumed in a short orders, or quickly moved to cold or even coolstorage facilities, a lot of them will go in the trash.

Today, MIT Professor Leon Glicksman from the Building Technology Program within the Department of Architecture, and Research Engineer Eric Verploegen of MIT D-Lab have published their open-source designs for an evaporative cooling chamber which can be constructed within a container from a salvaged shipping container that is powered by grid power or solar panels. The chamber can hold up to 168 crates of produce, the chamber has a lot of promise for small-scale farmers living in areas with dry, hot climates that require a cost-effective method of quick cooling down of newly harvested fruits and other vegetables so that they are fresh.

Verploegen has been making evaporative cooling the primary focus of his efforts in the past year and initially focused on smaller-scale Evaporative cooling “Zeer” pots that can hold in the range of 10 to 100 liters, which is ideal to use in the home and bigger double brick-walled chambers referred to as zero energy cooling chambers or ZECCs that can hold between 6 and 16 crates of vegetables at a time. They depend on airflow that is passive. The latest design released for the evaporative cooling chamber with forced air differs from the two designs that are more basic by an active airflow system in addition to having a bigger capacity.

In the year 2019 Verploegen began to think about the concept of creating an evaporative cooler that was larger and collaborated with Glicksman to study the idea of forcing rather than passive airflow to cool fruits and vegetable. After researching various cold storage methods as well as conducting research on the needs of farmers from Kenya and Kenya, they thought of the idea of using active evaporative cooling, using an old shipping container to form its structure for the chamber. In the midst of Covid-19 epidemic was gaining momentum in 2020, they bought an old shipping container that was 10 feet in length to be placed within the courtyard outside D-Lab close to Village Street, and went to create a model of the evaporative cooling chamber that is forced by air.

The way it’s operated is as follows Industrial fans draw dry, hot air inside the chamber that is then pushed through a porous and wet pad. The resultant cool and humid air is subsequently pushed through the containers of fruit and vegetables inside the room. The air is then channeled over the elevated floor and into a passageway through the insulation between exterior wall of the container, from which it is directed through the holes for exhaust near on the sides’ top walls.

More information is available at news.mit.edu