Temperature Adaptive Solar and Radiative Coating for Thermal Management of Terrestrial and Space Objects

The sky is a natural heat sink that has been extensively used for passive radiative cooling of households. Materials with minimized solar absorption and maximized infrared emission have been realized for daytime radiative cooling. To further improve the overall energy saving of radiative roofs, we developed a mechanically flexible solid film that adapts its thermal emittance to different ambient temperatures at zero energy consumption. Our recent efforts have led to the fabrication of the temperature adaptive radiative coating (TARC) at large scale and low cost. Experiments and simulations show TARC outperforms existing roof coatings for energy saving in most climates. A similar, temperature adaptive solar coating (TASC) could be also envisioned that adapts its solar absorptance to ambient temperature. The TARCs and TASCs may also find broad applications in other markets such as vehicles, spacecraft/spacesuits, textiles, and electronics, the benefits of which have been confirmed by our simulations.