The intention of this study was to select a material to be used as evaporative media for a passive cooling application. It is a part of another study dedicated to develop a more complex passive cooling building element, under current research. Samples from six different building materials and five textile fabrics were prepared for this purpose. A test tunnel was designed for that particular objective, and water absorption and water evaporation experiments under specific conditions were carried for each material.
Initial results showed that, in general, textile materials exhibit best behavior than building materials for the purposes we were looking, which was to find a material with good water absorption and evaporation abilities. It was additionally observed that, among building materials, one of the samples obtained from one of the ceramic hollow brick performed best. Between textile materials best behavior for the purpose of this study was found in a spacer fabric sample. In that way, these two samples were selected to be analyzed with higher attention. Test for different air temperatures and flow velocities conditions were then conducted. Results obtained in this second set of test show that higher air flow temperatures lead to higher water evaporation rates. Identical results were observed in tests with different air flow velocities. Analyzed all the results it was decided to choose the polyester spacer fabric with honeycomb structure as the material to be used in the passive cooling application being developed. It proved to be the material that exhibits the desirable behavior. It has a good capacity to absorb water and also permits it’s quickly evaporation.