Integration of daytime radiative cooling and solar heating for year-round energy saving in buildings

The heating and cooling energy consumption of buildings accounts for about 15% of national total energy consumption in the United States. In response to this challenge, many promising technologies with minimum carbon footprint have been proposed. However, most of the approaches are static and monofunctional, which can only reduce building energy consumption in certain conditions and climate zones. Here, we demonstrate a dual-mode device with electrostatically-controlled thermal contact conductance, which can achieve up to 71.6 W/m² of cooling power density and up to 643.4 W/m² of heating power density (over 93% of solar energy utilized) because of the suppression of thermal contact resistance and the engineering of surface morphology and optical property. Building energy simulation shows our dual-mode device, if widely deployed in the United States, can save 19.2% heating and cooling energy, which is 1.7 times higher than cooling-only and 2.2 times higher than heating-only approaches.

Xiuciang Li, Bowen Sun, Chenxi Sui, Ankita Nandi, Haoming Fang, Yucan Peng, Gang Tan, Po-Chun Hsu