New cooling panel radiates sunlight back into space

A team of researchers at Stanford University has designed an “entirely new” radiative cooling panel that could be used on buildings. The online newsletter, Phys.org reports that the panel reflects the vast majority of sunlight back into space, meaning it could cool manmade structures in the daytime.

The Stanford team, headed by Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering, was the team leader and senior author of a paper describing the device published in Nano Letters, March 5 and then reported in Phys.org. The Stanford team worked on overcoming the challenges of daytime radiative cooling by engineering nano-structured photonic materials to enhance or suppress light reflection in certain wavelengths.

Radiative cooling at nighttime has been studied extensively, but the challenges of radiative cooling during the day when the sun is shining and heating up buildings, remains a hurdle.

But according to phys.org,  “Using engineered nanophotonic materials the team was able to strongly suppress how much heat-inducing sunlight the panel absorbs, while it radiates heat very efficiently in the key frequency range necessary to escape Earth’s atmosphere. The material is made of quartz and silicon carbide, both very weak absorbers of sunlight.”

The device can achieve a net cooling power more than 100 watts per square metre.

To see the article, click here.

http://phys.org/news/2013-03-solar-cools-full-sunlight.html#nwlt