Passive daytime radiative cooling already exists, but it only chills surfaces by 3 to 5°C—far short of the 50 to 60°C below ambient that the physics allows. The problem is parasitic heat gain from surrounding air and materials. Current radiative coolers lose their advantage because conductive and convective heat leaks overwhelm the skyward radiation. This project aims to eliminate those losses by building a new composite panel—the Radiatively Cooled Vacuum Insulation Panel (RC-VIP)—that combines vacuum insulation, aerogels, nanophotonics, and organic electronic encapsulation into a single sealed unit. Each component must be redesigned from scratch to work with radiative cooling. If successful, the technology could provide continuous refrigeration without any electricity input. That would directly decarbonise cooling in buildings, transport, data centres, food cold chains, and industrial or life-science applications—sectors where cooling demand is exploding and currently relies on energy-intensive compressors and refrigerants. The work is applied engineering, not fundamental science, but it targets a specific physical bottleneck that has kept a promising passive technology stuck at demonstration scale.
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Cooling is a fundamental means to preserve peoples' good-health and well-being. Yet, it is one of the most energy demanding anthropogenic activities with global demand forecasted to increase manifold in the near future. Accordingly, we are called upon to resolve a great paradox whereby, reversing climate change necessitates strides to energy efficiency and elimination of greenhouse emissions, amid exploding demand for energy intensive processes like cooling. An emerging solution to this conundrum is passive daytime radiative cooling. The process elegantly leverages the cold Universe, converting it into an inexhaustible heatsink for the thermal radiation from objects on Earth. The cooling power current state-of-art systems achieve is enough to lower their temperature by typically 3-5°C. Compare with the fundamental limits of the technology though - 50-60°C below ambient - and it becomes obvious that today's operating point is at least an order of magnitude below the true technological potential. The bottleneck in current systems lies with the conductive and convective parasitic heat losses. Should these losses be eliminated, radiatively cooled surfaces would be freed up to equilibrate at refrigeration temperatures. To accomplish this task, advanced thermal engineering solutions will be developed, inspired by cutting-edge vacuum insulation, aerogel, nanophotonic and organic electronic encapsulation technologies. As they stand however, none of these technologies are directly compatible with radiative cooling. As such, every single component has to be radically rethought and meticulously redesigned, creating in the process a breakthrough new technology termed the Radiatively Cooled - Vacuum Insulation Panel (RC-VIP). By fully exploiting this platform technology, literally any cooling "hungry" sector can be targeted for decarbonization: the built and transport environments, data-centres, food coldchains, cooling in industrial and life-science applications, and so on.
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