Daytime passive radiative cooler using porous alumina

By Yang Fu, Jiang Yang, Yishu Su, Wei Du, Yungui Ma. Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, 2018

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report a daytime passive radiative cooler using chemically fabricated porous anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membranes. Effective medium theory (EMT) has been applied to analyzing the optical properties of the air-doped porous medium. The composite structure is specifically optimized so that it has a high absorbance (emittance) in the far-infrared atmospheric window and nearly no loss in the solar spectrum. The calculated emittance is well reproduced in the experiment by our AAO sample. The fabricated porous membrane shows a potential cooling power density of 64 W/m2 at ambient (humidity = 75%) under direct sunlight irradiance (AM1.5). Experimentally, the sample is cooled by a 2.6C temperature reduction below the ambient air temperature in the sunlight. This performance shows little variance at night. The AAO approach proposed here may provide a promising way to produce low-cost and efficient radiative cooler in large scales for feasible energy conservation.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a878b8d8fa63b11bd5b418b046ec8a19a9dc78ac

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In Civil and Structural Engineering

1. Zhihua Zhou
2. Junwei Liu
3. W. Feng
4. Ji Zhang
5. Jian Zuo

Citations in the corpus

• Advances and challenges in commercializing radiative cooling (2019, background): “To date, researchers have improved the mid-infrared emissivity to more than 95% in the atmospheric window [29,37], and further improvement of the infrared emissivity has less impact on the net cooling power, due to low energy density of RC.”