Comment Seems potentially unsanitary (Score 1) 183
The article says that the creators of this envision it as a structural element of buildings. Where you would have an entire wall made of this material that gets soaked with water to cool the space when it gets hot. I have not dealt with a swamp coolers but I have dealt with humidifiers quite a lot. The one thing that I have observed is that every part that gets wet grows a colony of who knows what pretty fast if it isn’t regularly cleaned. In a lot of systems you have a pad, which is frequently structured very similarly to this material, which has to be replaced because there is no real way to clean the interior surfaces. Well with this stuff they are talking about taking that pad and making a permanent wall out of it. My prediction is that anybody who used this would end up with a huge mold filled science experiment in a fairly short time. The closest thing I can see to being able to really clean that would be to periodically saturate the wall with some sort of chemical cleaner. I could see these printed ceramic structures being used to make swamp coolers, and humidifiers, more efficient but use outlined in the article just seems like a bad idea.