Analysis of cooling materials, Simulation and Representation of a PE polymer material for cooling energy saving

Abstract

[ES] El proyecto tiene como objetivo estudiar diferentes materiales de refrigeración de edificios para el ahorro de energía. Se realizará una simulación por programación para evaluar el comportamiento de los materiales, y se realizarán muestras del más eficiente en el laboratorio. Para concluir, el ahorro de energía de enfriamiento del material más eficiente se representará en un mapa a nivel estatal de los EE. UU.

[EN] The cooling of buildings represents a significant energy demand, and there is an urgent need to develop innovative solutions to reduce energy consumption and mitigate the effects of climate change. One promising solution that can help curb this energy demand is radiative cooling, a passive cooling technology that harnesses the reflective power of specialized materials to dissipate heat efficiently from structures. These materials can reflect sunlight well and emit thermal radiation in the mid-infrared range, resulting in optimal heat transfer and lower energy consumption when cooling buildings. In this study, the potential energy saving of passive radiative cooling is analyzed for various U.S. cities from different climate zones. Historic weather data and EnergyPlus software are used in that analysis. Then, a self-developed program code is used to further evaluate the radiative cooling performance under various experiments parameters, which shed lights to the optimization towards the real-world application. Finally, a simple and scalable fabrication radiative cooler that used polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and inorganic fillers is designed and made. Spectra characterizations on the fabricated radiative coolers show decent optical performance.