Radiative cooling to deep sub-freezing temperatures through a 24-h day–night cycle
By Zhen Chen, Linxiao Zhu, Aaswath Pattabhi Raman, Shanhui Fan. Nature Communications, 2016
792 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Radiative cooling technology utilizes the atmospheric transparency window (8–13 μm) to passively dissipate heat from Earth into outer space (3 K). This technology has attracted broad interests from both fundamental sciences and real world applications, ranging from passive building cooling, renewable energy harvesting and passive refrigeration in arid regions. However, the temperature reduction experimentally demonstrated, thus far, has been relatively modest. Here we theoretically show that ultra-large temperature reduction for as much as 60 °C from ambient is achievable by using a selective thermal emitter and by eliminating parasitic thermal load, and experimentally demonstrate a temperature reduction that far exceeds previous works. In a populous area at sea level, we have achieved an average temperature reduction of 37 °C from the ambient air temperature through a 24-h day–night cycle, with a maximal reduction of 42 °C that occurs when the experimental set-up enclosing the emitter is exposed to peak solar irradiance. Radiative cooling relies on the atmosphere’s transparency window. Here the authors achieve up to 42 °C drops in temperature for low thermal loads under diffuse sunlight by improving the selectivity of the emissivity and the thermal management of their devices.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Civil and Structural Engineering, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ed80de918a6c1e0a04f1e29fc1551ab12c36e43
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Citations in the corpus
- Radiative sky cooling: fundamental physics, materials, structures, and applications (2017, positive): “Consequently, the temperature range in which the selective radiative coolers (from 8 to 13 μm) are preferable needs to be at least ~5 K lower than the ambient instead of just below-ambient, which is in good agreement with Figure 1c in [47].”
- Advances and challenges in commercializing radiative cooling (2019, methodology): “flux and use sunshade to prevent radiative coolers from absorbing the direct sunlight, and the absorption of diffuse sunlight can be suppressed by nanoporous polyethylene film [24,25].”