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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, @09:40PM
You're thinking about the wrong ambient temperature. The key word is "space." Space is, on average, cold [vif.com] (pdf) at around 3 K. Because we're near the Sun, and because the albedo of the Earth is less than unity, and because of the atmosphere, we're not so cold. The dark side of the Moon gets cold, and craters near its poles are always cold. The effort here is to work around the effect of the Earth's atmosphere.