Iceberg Cool

A bold way to beat the heat

Rising out of a field on the campus of Princeton University is an eerie-looking Dacron-covered dome that suggests a wayward spaceship. Inside is something that looks either like a miniature Matterhorn or perhaps a giant Sno-Cone wrapped in plastic. In fact, the mound is the tip of an iceberg. Beneath it, nestled into a 10-ft.-deep hole in the ground, is a thick heap of slowly melting ice. To its creator, Theodore Taylor, a nuclear physicist turned alternative-energy researcher, the pile of ice is proof that there are better and cheaper ways than air conditioning to cool people off on a hot day.

Taylor calls his invention an ice pond, and the way it works is astonishingly simple. Basically, the pond is nothing more than a 60-ft.-wide plastic-lined hole in the ground filled with ice. To make the ice, Taylor last winter used a snowmaking machine similar to those found at ski resorts. Instead of making actual snow, however, he adjusted the machine's nozzle to spray out a substance that was roughly the consistency of wet sherbet, which was squirted into the hole. The water part of the slush drained to the bottom, leaving ice granules above. A system of pipes and pumps drew off the ice water from the bottom of the pond, and it was recirculated by other pipes and pumps back to the snowmaker. The water was then sprayed out onto the pile all over again, as slush, adding still more ice granules to the growing mound. After several weeks, a compact mound of ice about 30 ft. thick had been formed.

As summer has progressed, the mound of ice has begun to melt slowly, sending ice water trickling down through the granules to the bottom of the pond.

The collector pipes are now gathering the ice water and pumping it to a nearby building, where it is being circulated through cooling vents in the rooms.

By the end of the summer, most of the ice in the pond will have melted, but the temperature of the constantly recirculating water in the system will remain at little more than 32DEG F, or that of true ice water. Meanwhile, the building is staying at a comfortable 70DEG F. Of course, the ice ponds could only be used for buildings with a large amount of empty land near by. It would take about 100 tons of ice, or enough to fill a 20-sq.-ft. hole 10 ft. deep, to cool the average American home from spring to autumn.

Though Taylor's test pond has not yet completed its first full summer of operation, Prudential Insurance is already planning its own ice pond, to cool a building now being built by the firm on land adjoining the Princeton campus. Engineers estimate that the company will save as much as $10,000 to $15,000 in annual electrical costs by using ice-pond cooling instead of standard air conditioning.

Engineering extravaganzas are nothing new to Taylor. As a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos, N. Mex., in the 1950s, he designed the largest fission bomb that had ever been exploded. In the 1960s he worked on the U.S. Air Force's Project Orion, an aborted fission-powered spaceship that was supposed to explore the solar system. For now, Taylor is happy with his melting ice mound. Says he: "Standing on that pile of ice is pure adventure. We are developing the first renewable-energy cooling system that is competitive with electrical air conditioning."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.