A passive
cooling strategy without any electricity input has shown
a significant impact on overall energy consumption globally. However,
designing tunable daytime radiative cooler to meet requirement of
different weather conditions is still a big challenge, especially
in hot, humid regions. Here, a novel type of tunable, thermally insulating
and compressible cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) aerogel coolers is prepared
via chemical cross-linking and unidirectional freeze casting process.
Such aerogel coolers can achieve a subambient temperature drop of
9.2 °C under direct sunlight and promisingly reached the reduction
of ∼7.4 °C even in hot, moist, and fickle extreme surroundings.
The tunable cooling performance can be realized via controlling the
compression ratio of shape-malleable aerogel coolers. Furthermore,
energy consumption modeling of using such aerogel coolers in buildings
in China shows 35.4% reduction of cooling energy. This work can pave
the way toward designing high-performance, thermal-regulating materials
for energy consumption savings.
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