Browsing the internet today I came across this very esoteric paper which purports to describe the construction of a device which uses the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen (a highly endothermic process) with KOH as a catalyst to cool down a room as a replacement for an Air Conditioner: https://www.researchpublish.com/upload/book/Electrolysis%20Air%20Cooler-3057.pdf
The enthalpy of the reaction is +285.83 kJ/mol, and while most of the energy input comes from the electricity being supplied, a fair portion (around 20%) comes from heat in the surroundings at standard temperatures so the basic chemistry/physics is there:
As stated, splitting a mole of liquid water to produce a mole of hydrogen at 25°C requires 285.8 kJ of energy—237.2 kJ as electricity and 48.6 kJ as heat.
Reference for this: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy10osti/47302.pdf
The authors of the paper describe the construction of such a device as well as a test showing that it is indeed capable of reducing temperatures inside a room (the paper itself is not well written so a lot of things are unclear, but they definitely did get the idea to work )
I found the idea quite intriguing, especially given that it generates hydrogen which can be stored to be used later as a fuel. I was not able to find any other references to this idea on the internet, which makes me suspect there is something else going on which makes the idea impractical for why other people haven't independently come up with the same thing and developed it further but I can't think of anything except for the hydrogen gas generated being an explosive hazard (but that can be stored/vented away so shouldn't be a big issue).
So, is this idea viable, or is there something big I'm missing?
