Daytime radiative cooling presents an exciting new strategy for combating global warming, because it can passively cool buildings by reflecting sunlight and utilizing the infrared atmospheric window to eject heat into outer space. Recent progress with novel material designs showed promising subambient cooling performance under direct sunlight. However, large-scale implementation of radiative cooling technologies is still limited by the high-cost and complex fabrication. Here, we develop a nanoporous polymer matrix composite (PMC) to enable rapid production and cost reduction using commercially available polymer processing techniques, such as molding, extrusion, and 3D printing. With a high solar reflectance of 96.2% and infrared emissivity > 90%, the nanoporous PMC achieved a subambient temperature drop of 6.1 °C and cooling power of 85 W/m 2 under direct sunlight, which are comparable to the state-of-the-art. This work offers great promise to make radiative cooling technologies more viable for saving energy and reducing emissions in building cooling applications.
Bottlebrush polymers
are a class of semiflexible, hierarchical
macromolecules with unique potential for shape-, architecture-, and
composition-based structure–property design. It is now well-established
that in dilute to semidilute solution, bottlebrush homopolymers adopt
a wormlike conformation, which decreases in extension (persistence
length) as the concentration and molecular overlap increase. By comparison,
the solution phase self-assembly of bottlebrush diblock copolymers
(BBCP) in a good solvent remains poorly understood, despite critical
relevance for solution processing of ordered phases and photonic crystals.
In this work, we combine small-angle X-ray scattering, coarse-grained
simulation, and polymer synthesis to map the equilibrium phase behavior
and conformation of a set of large, nearly symmetric PS-b-PLA bottlebrush diblock copolymers in toluene. Three BBCP are synthesized,
with side chains of number-averaged molecular weights of 4500 (PS)
and 4200 g/mol (PLA) and total backbone degrees of polymerization
of 100, 255, and 400 repeat units. The grafting density is one side
chain per backbone repeat unit. With increasing concentration in solution,
all three polymers progress through a similar structural transition:
from dispersed, wormlike chains with concentration-dependent (decreasing)
extension, through the onset of disordered PS/PLA compositional fluctuations,
to the formation of a long-range ordered lamellar phase. With increasing
concentration in the microphase-separated regimes, the domain spacing
increases as individual chains partially re-extend due to block immiscibility.
Increases in the backbone degree of polymerization lead to changes
in the scattering profiles which are consistent with the increased
segregation strength. Coarse-grained simulations using an implicit
side-chain model are performed, and concentration-dependent self-assembly
behavior is qualitatively matched to experiments. Finally, using the
polymer with the largest backbone length, we demonstrate that lamellar
phases develop a well-defined photonic band gap in solution, which
can be tuned across the visible spectrum by varying polymer concentration.
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