New Spanish nanomaterial cools surfaces by up to 12.9C without electricity
Spanish Scientists Achieve 12.9°C Passive Surface Cooling Without Power
Poinews.com – During the hottest, driest, and sunniest days of last summer, a coated panel mounted on a rooftop in Tres Cantos, Madrid, registered temperatures up to 12.9°C below an uncoated control sample. No compressor hummed. No plug was connected. The entire thermal drop was produced by a thin nanomaterial that simply radiates heat straight into space.
The work, carried out by the Functional Nanoscale Devices for Energy (FINDER) group at the Institute of Micro and Nanotechnology (IMN-CNM, CSIC), was published in the journal Nanophotonics. It targets a problem of considerable scale: cooling systems already consume close to 20% of all electricity generated worldwide, and that share keeps climbing.
The Atmospheric Shortcut
The technique at the heart of the project is daytime passive radiative cooling. Earth's atmosphere is not uniformly opaque to infrared radiation. Between 8 and 13 micrometres of wavelength, a spectral window remains open, allowing thermal energy to escape directly into outer space without being reabsorbed by greenhouse gases. Any surface that emits strongly within that band while simultaneously bouncing back incoming sunlight can settle below ambient air temperature, entirely passively.
Why PVDF, and Why the Shape Matters
The researchers selected polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a polymer long recognised for its infrared emissivity. Cristina Vicente, an IMN-CNM scientist who leads the COOLed project, describes the rationale:
"brings together a combination of properties" that make it ideal
Beyond efficient thermal emission, PVDF resists ultraviolet degradation, sheds water (producing a self-cleaning effect), and endures prolonged outdoor exposure.
The decisive advance, however, was not the choice of polymer but the architecture imposed upon it. The team infiltrated PVDF into nanoporous templates of anodised aluminium oxide, generating three-dimensional microstructures whose internal geometry can be tuned with nanometre-scale precision. Because the optical performance of such coolers is dictated by features at that scale, controlling the internal topology was essential to unlocking the full cooling potential.
Measured Performance
After ultrafast cooling treatment following polymer infiltration, the optimised structure reflected an average of 82.4% of incident solar radiation and emitted 96.7% of its thermal load within the 8-to-13-micrometre atmospheric window. Under a standard solar irradiance of 1,000 W/m², the calculated cooling capacity reached 182.3 W/m².
The rooftop trial in Tres Cantos, where peak solar irradiance hit 962 W/m², validated that figure under real atmospheric conditions. Prior to deployment, the samples underwent ultraviolet light treatment that whitens the surface and further elevates its solar reflectance.
From Laboratory to Built Environment
The authors are explicit that the technology remains in development. They nonetheless underline that the fabrication route is comparatively inexpensive and compatible with manufacturing lines already in industrial operation. That compatibility points toward a broad application spectrum: building façades and rooftops, thermal management for electronic devices, vehicle surfaces, and even wearable personal-cooling systems. The unifying objective across all of them is the same—reducing reliance on conventional air conditioning and, with it, the associated carbon emissions.
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