A radiative cooling structural material
By Tian Li, Yao Zhai, Shuaiming He, Wentao Gan, Zhiyuan Wei, Mohammad Heidarinejad, Daniel A. Dalgo, Ruiyu Mi, Jianwei Song, J. Dai and 8 more. Science, 2019
1,371 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A stronger, cooler wood One good way to reduce the amount of cooling a building needs is to make sure it reflects away infrared radiation. Passive radiative cooling materials are engineered to do this extremely well. Li et al. engineered a wood through delignification and re-pressing to create a mechanically strong material that also cools passively. They modeled the cooling savings of their wood for 16 different U.S. cities, which suggested savings between 20 and 50%. Cooling wood would be of particular value in hot and dry climates. Science, this issue p. 760 A process of delignification and reapplication of pressure creates a strong wood-based passive radiative cooling material. Reducing human reliance on energy-inefficient cooling methods such as air conditioning would have a large impact on the global energy landscape. By a process of complete delignification and densification of wood, we developed a structural material with a mechanical strength of 404.3 megapascals, more than eight times that of natural wood. The cellulose nanofibers in our engineered material backscatter solar radiation and emit strongly in mid-infrared wavelengths, resulting in continuous subambient cooling during both day and night. We model the potential impact of our cooling wood and find energy savings between 20 and 60%, which is most pronounced in hot and dry climates.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0355e1ec25acb9be83063ac5b0e410a2e23e0bf6
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Citations in the corpus
- Controlling macroscopic heat transfer with thermal metamaterials: Theory, experiment and application (2021, background): “So far, the radiative cooling technology has been used in many practical applications, including those for making oods stronger and cooler [37].”
- Temperature-adaptive radiative coating for all-season household thermal regulation (2021, background): “It is now advanced by the development of daytime radiative cooling (7–13) using materials with low solar absorptance and high thermal emittance in the form of thin films (8), organic paints (10, 14), or structural materials (11).”