Authors: Xin Huang, Jyotirmoy Mandal,* Aaswath Raman*
Journal Link: Journal of Photonics for Energy, 12(1), 012112 (2021).
Download Paper and Supporting Information
Datasets: Link
Summary: If you are interested in radiative cooling technologies, and want to try out a design for yourself, this fun little paper reports a convenient way to make radiative coolers at home. Made from scotch tape (with acrylic adhesive) and aluminum foil, our radiative coolers can reach sub-ambient temperatures (by 11 C or more under the right conditions). Under clear skies, one could use it to harvest dew, couple it to thermoelectric modules to generate electricity, or just cool things.
Although it was a fun DIY project, my motivation for designing this was its potential as a standard and experimental control. The radiative cooling field has seen a lot of work over the past few years, but few ways to verify experimental results or compare designs. I hope that the simplicity and reproducibility of this design will make it useful as a reference. Towards that end, detailed optical parameters of the scotch tape is provided on dataset link above. Have fun making!
Jyotirmoy Mandal 