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Scalable and hierarchically designed polymer film as a selective thermal emitter for high-performance all-day radiative cooling

Nature Nanotechnology volume 16, pages 153–158 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Traditional cooling systems consume tremendous amounts of energy and thus aggravate the greenhouse effect1,2. Passive radiative cooling, dissipating an object’s heat through an atmospheric transparency window (8–13 μm) to outer space without any energy consumption, has attracted much attention3,4,5,6,7,8,9. The unique feature of radiative cooling lies in the high emissivity in the atmospheric transparency window through which heat can be dissipated to the universe. Therefore, for achieving high cooling performance, the design and fabrication of selective emitters, with emission strongly dominant in the transparency window, is of essential importance, as such spectral selection suppresses parasitic absorption from the surrounding thermal radiation. Recently, various materials and structures with tailored spectrum responses have been investigated to achieve the effect of daytime radiative cooling6,7,8,10,11,12,13,14,15. However, most of the radiative cooling materials reported possess broad-band absorption/emission covering the whole mid-infrared wavelength11,12,13,14,15. Here we demonstrate that a hierarchically designed polymer nanofibre-based film, produced by a scalable electrostatic spinning process, enables selective mid-infrared emission, effective sunlight reflection and therefore excellent all-day radiative cooling performance. Specifically, the C–O–C (1,260–1,110 cm−1) and C–OH (1,239–1,030 cm−1) bonding endows the selective emissivity of 78% in 8–13 μm wavelength range, and the design of nanofibres with a controlled diameter allows for a high reflectivity of 96.3% in 0.3–2.5 μm wavelength range. As a result, we observe ~3 °C cooling improvement of this selective thermal emitter as compared to that of a non-selective emitter at night, and 5 °C sub-ambient cooling under sunlight. The impact of this hierarchically designed selective thermal emitter on alleviating global warming and temperature regulating an Earth-like planet is also analysed, with a significant advantage demonstrated. With its excellent cooling performance and a scalable process, this hierarchically designed selective thermal emitter opens a new pathway towards large-scale applications of all-day radiative cooling materials.

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Fig. 1: The theoretical analysis and fabrication process of the selective thermal emitter.
Fig. 2: The structures and optical properties of es-PEO.
Fig. 3: Cooling performance of a selective emitter es-PEO film, in comparison with a non-selective emitter.
Fig. 4: The simulation of cooling Earth and the high-temperature Earth-like planet Kepler-62e.

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All relevant data are included in the manuscript and Supplementary Information. More detailed protocols, calculations and analysis are available from the authors upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the micro-fabrication centre of National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures (NLSSM) for technical support. This work is jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (no. 2017YFA0205700), National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos 52002168, 51925204, 11874211 and 61735008) and Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (no. BK20190311). W.L. and S.F. acknowledge the support of US Department of Energy grant no. DE-FG-07ER46426.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Duo Li, Xin Liu, Wei Li.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, P. R. China

    Duo Li, Xin Liu, Zhenhui Lin, Bin Zhu, Zizhong Li, Jinlei Li, Bo Li & Jia Zhu

  2. Ginzton Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Wei Li & Shanhui Fan

  3. State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, China

    Wei Li

  4. School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, P. R. China

    Jiwei Xie

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  1. Duo Li
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Contributions

B.Z. and J.Z. conceived and designed the project. D.L., X.L., J.L. and B.L. performed the material preparation and characterization. D.L., X.L. and W.L. contributed to the optical and thermal measurement and analysis. W.L., Z. Lin and Z. Li performed the calculations. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Bin Zhu or Jia Zhu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Nanotechnology thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–11 and Discussion.

Supplementary Video

The process of roll-to-roll electrospinning es-PEO film.

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Li, D., Liu, X., Li, W. et al. Scalable and hierarchically designed polymer film as a selective thermal emitter for high-performance all-day radiative cooling. Nat. Nanotechnol. 16, 153–158 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-020-00800-4

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