Engineers overcome passive cooling technology challenge

Air conditioning is said to account for around 15 per cent of total primary energy consumption in the United States and can be as high as 70 per cent in countries like Saudi Arabia.

Technologies that use radiative cooling to control the temperature of buildings, such as planar multi-layered photonic films and hybrid metamaterial films, are attracting attention because they do not use electricity. A major drawback is that they are complicated and costly to manufacture.

Thermoelectric material converts waste heat into electricity

KAUST team create hydrogel combination to tap more water from air

Now, a team led by Qiaoqiang Gan and graduate student Lyu Zhou from The State University of New York at Buffalo, Jian-Wei Liang and colleagues from Boon Ooi's Photonics Laboratory at KAUST in Saudi Arabia, working with researchers from the University of Wisconsin, have developed a passive cooling technology made from a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)/aluminium film structure. The research is described in Nature Sustainability.