Daytime passive radiative cooling is a promising electricity-free pathway for cooling terrestrial buildings. Current research interest in this cooling strategy mainly lies in tailoring the optical spectra of materials for strong thermal emission and high solar reflection. However, environmental heat gain poses a crucial challenge to building cooling at subambient temperatures. Herein, we devise a scalable thermal insulating cooler (TIC) consisting of hierarchically hollow microfibers as the building envelope that simultaneously achieves passive daytime radiative cooling and thermal insulation to reduce environmental heat gain. The TIC demonstrates efficient solar reflection (94%) and long-wave infrared emission (94%), yielding a temperature drop of about 9 °C under sunlight of 900 W/m 2 . Notably, the thermal conductivity of the TIC is lower than that of air, thus preventing heat flow from external environments to indoor space in the summer, an additional benefit that does not sacrifice the radiative cooling performance. A building energy simulation shows that 48.5% of cooling energy could be saved if the TIC is widely deployed in China.
Water covers about 70% of the earth's surface and contains tremendous energy that remains untapped. Despite success in harvesting hydrodynamic energy based on heavy‐weight and bulky electromagnetic generators, a great deal of water energies stored in the low‐frequency flow of water such as in the form of raindrops, river/ocean waves, and the tide, remain largely untapped. In spite of diversity in development strategies and working mechanisms, engineering efficient water energy harvesting devices, especially nanogenerators, requires the elegant control of interfacial properties of substrates for rapid liquid mass and momentum transfer and effective electron generation/transfer. In particular, inspired by various special wetting phenomena in nature, the design of superwetting surfaces offers a new dimension to fundamentally mediate the way the liquid, as well as the charge, interact with the substrate. Herein, the latest progress in the development of nanogenerators with three distinctive interface types—solid/liquid, solid/solid, and liquid/liquid interfaces—are summarized and their representative applications, challenges, and future perspectives are highlighted.
Self-roughened and biodegradable superhydrophobic fabrics with solar-induced self-healing property are constructed for versatile and efficient oil–water separation.
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