Enhanced Color‐Preserving Radiative Coolers for Versatile Architectural Applications

Abstract

AbstractGlobal climate crises are the most significant challenges to be solved these days. As one of the technological endeavors to tackle the issue, radiative cooling is amongst the most attractive approaches for sustainable heat energy regulation, which involves maximizing solar heat reflection and thermal heat emission. These green technologies inevitably require architectural applicability, considering that building facades take a large proportion of the heat‐radiating surfaces. For mass‐production suitability and durability, radiative coolers (RCs) fabricated in a fully ceramic context are recently suggested, featuring scalable, thermally insulative, and non‐shrinking advantages. However, the visual effects are also imperative for architectural instances but are seldom accounted for. In this context, this article suggests the enhanced color‐preserving radiative cooling (ECRC) structure for practical architectural applications of glass‐infiltrated ceramic RCs. By simply blending ceramic pigment into the uppermost porous alumina layer, the ECRC structure can maintain the physical, and thermal features of all‐ceramic RC, while exhibiting color by visible reflectance adjustment. ECRCs exhibit an additional cooling performance of up to ≈17.3 °C depending on their color, compared to their conventional counterparts. With additional chromatic features, ECRC can further enhance the availability of radiative cooling technology for practically realizing the energy‐saving structures in real‐world architectural circumstances.