Enhancing Urban Sustainability: An Automatic Rooftop Cooling Mechanism for Smart City

Greenhouse gas emissions have been the direct offshoot of urbanization, which in turn has raised the temperature of these urban cities. Fans and air-conditioners have been the conventional practice to lower the temperature inside the rooms/buildings in such urban cities. This paper proposes an alternative solution to room cooling using the principle of evaporation through the water-spraying approach from the rooftop to towards the room space. Aptly named an automatic rooftop cooling system, it also attempts to comply with energy efficiency and sustainability. This system has a DHT11 sensor for real-time temperature monitoring, an Arduino microcontroller for automatic actuation, and a Peltier module for cooling water. Here, the cooled water is sprayed on the rooftop, which then cools the room by absorbing the heat of the rooftop, and then this heat absorbed water is collected in a reservoir from where it is sent to the rooftop again after cooling it through the Peltier module. The DHT11 sensor keeps a tab on the temperature, while the Arduino microcontroller actuates the Peltier module when the temperature rises to a certain threshold limit. Experimental results showed that the room temperature dropped for a given period, validating the system’s potential to lower the heat buildup in urban settings. The methodology included the calculation of heat conduction, water flow efficiency and the overall system performance.