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Low cost, energy-saving radiative cooling system ready for real-world applications (edit: fixed link)
University of Colorado Boulder and University of Wyoming engineers have successfully scaled up an innovative water-cooling system capable of providing continuous day-and-night radiative cooling for structures. The advance could increase the efficiency of power generation plants in summer and lead to more efficient, environmentally-friendly temperature control for homes, businesses, utilities and industries.
The new research demonstrates how the low-cost hybrid organic-inorganic radiative cooling metamaterial, which debuted in 2017, can be scaled into a roughly 140-square-foot array—small enough to fit on most rooftops—and act as a kind of natural air conditioner with almost no consumption of electricity.
"You could place these panels on the roof of a single-family home and satisfy its cooling requirements," said Dongliang Zhao, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in CU Boulder's Department of Mechanical Engineering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:07PM
we know that it is impossible for it to ever cool below minimum ambient
Others working in this field placed an object in an insulated box with a window pointing toward the sky. They attached their similar film to the top of the object. They say that the temperature of the object fell below the ambient temperature. I don't remember clearly, but I understood it as meaning below the minimum ambient temperature. Wouldn't the theoretical minimum, for the arrangement I described, be the temperature of the cosmic background radiation? That's around 3 kelvin. Ambient temperatures on Earth are around 300 kelvin.