AWARD YEAR
2017
CATEGORY
Community
GOALS
Sustainable Cities & Communities
KEYWORDS
energy, Materials , sustainability
COUNTRY
United States of America
DESIGNED BY
Ronggui Yang and Xiaobo Yin
WEBSITE
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21716599-film-worth-watching-how-keep-cool-without-costing-earth
Cooling metamaterial
a film that can cool buildings without the use of refrigerants or power
The new film works by a process called radiative cooling. This takes advantage of that fact that Earth’s atmosphere allows certain wavelengths of heat-carrying infrared radiation to escape into space unimpeded. Convert unwanted heat into infrared of the correct wavelength, then, and you can dump it into the cosmos with no come back.
Dr Yang and Dr Yin are not the first to try to cool buildings in this way. Shanhui Fan and his colleagues at Stanford University, in California, demonstrated a device that used the principle in 2014. Their material, though, consisted of seven alternating layers of hafnium dioxide and silicon dioxide of varying thicknesses, laid onto a wafer made of silicon. This would be difficult and expensive to manufacture in bulk.