Bilayer porous polymer for efficient passive building cooling

By C. Feng, Peihua Yang, Huidong Liu, Mao Mingran, Yipu Liu, Tong Xue, Jia Fu, Ting Cheng, Xuejiao Hu, H. Fan and 1 more. Nano Energy, 2021

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Passive building cooling without any electricity input are highly desirable in pursuing low energy consumption and environment protection. However, widespread adoption of existing techniques is restrained by the complex system design or low cooling power. Herein, we propose an efficient passive cooling approach with a bilayer porous polymer film, which comprises a hygroscopic hydrogel and a hydrophobic top layer with hierarchically pores. The hydrogel implements evaporative cooling in the daytime and regenerates itself at night. The top layer protects and radiatively cools the hydrogel, which enhances the cooling power during day and helps the hydrogel regeneration at night. With the synergistic effect, the bilayer film attains a remarkable sub-ambient temperature drops of ~7 °C and an effective cooling power of ~150 W·m−2 under direct sunlight, showing great potential for low-cost, efficient and scalable passive building cooling.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f99e6e30f12cfc1c9da8a59d621ef4f6cf6d945e