Daytime radiative cooling
http://nanotechnologytoday.blogspot.com/2013/03/ultrabroadband-photonic-structures-to.html
Ultrabroadband Photonic Structures To Achieve High-Performance
Daytime Radiative Cooling. A Stanford team has designed an entirely new
form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a
panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and
other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of
space.
Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that
don't heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer
space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any
more.
A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of
cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a
structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars
and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum
of space.
“People usually see space as a source of heat from the sun, but away
from the sun outer space is really a cold, cold place,” explained
Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and the paper’s senior
author. “We’ve developed a new type of structure that reflects the vast
majority of sunlight, while at the same time it sends heat into that
coldness, which cools manmade structures even in the day time.”
The trick, from an engineering standpoint, is two-fold. First, the
reflector has to reflect as much of the sunlight as possible. Poor
reflectors absorb too much sunlight, heating up in the process and
defeating the purpose of cooling.
The second challenge is that the structure must efficiently radiate heat
back into space. Thus, the structure must emit thermal radiation very
efficiently within a specific wavelength range in which the atmosphere
is nearly transparent. Outside this range, Earth’s atmosphere simply
reflects the light back down. Most people are familiar with this
phenomenon. It’s better known as the greenhouse effect—the cause of
global climate change.
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