New water-cooling solar panels could lower the cost of air conditioning by 20%

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BeNotDeceived
Agent38
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New water-cooling solar panels could lower the cost of air conditioning by 20%

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... Researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, recently placed three water cooling panels—each 0.37 square meters—atop a building on campus and circulated water through them at a rate of 0.2 liters every minute. They report today in Nature Energy that their setup cooled the water as much as 5°C below the ambient temperature over 3 days of testing. ... New water-cooling solar panels could lower the cost of air conditioning by 20%

Awesome type stuff. :ymapplause:

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Re: New water-cooling solar panels could lower the cost of air conditioning by 20%

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email: Topic reply notification wrote:You are receiving this notification ... This topic has received a reply by Ezra
From memory, this may help?

... During the day most materials—concrete, asphalt, metals, and even people—absorb visible and near-infrared (IR) light from the sun. That added energy excites molecules, which warm up and, over time, emit the energy back out as photons with longer wavelengths, typically in the midrange of the infrared spectrum. That helps the materials cool back down, particularly at night when they are no longer absorbing visible light but are still radiating IR photons.

In recent years, researchers have tried to goose this “passive cooling” effect by making materials that absorb as little visible light as possible yet continue to emit mid-IR light. In 2014, for example, researchers led by Shanhui Fan, an electrical engineer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, created a sandwich like film of silicon dioxide (glass) and hafnium dioxide that reflected almost all the light that hit it while strongly emitting mid-IR light, a combination that allowed it to cool surfaces by as much as 5°C. Still, Fan and his colleagues had to use clean room technology to make their films, a costly process that doesn’t work well on a large scale.

When Xiaobo Yin, a materials scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, saw Fan’s paper, he noticed the material worked in part by encouraging infrared photons to bounce back and forth between the layers of the film in a manner that made it a stronger IR emitter. Yin wondered whether there was a simpler way to do this. From previous work, Yin knew that spherical objects can act like tiny resonance chambers—much as the sound box of a guitar encourages sound waves of a particular frequency to bounce back and forth inside. He and his colleagues calculated that glass beads about 8 micrometers in diameter—little bigger than a red blood cell—would make powerful IR resonators and thus strong IR emitters.

So they bought a batch of glass powder from a commercial supplier and mixed it with ... sciencemag.org: plastic film cools whatever it touches up to 10°C

Essentially, energy is converted into a wavelength that radiates into space, as though the atmosphere wasn't there. Image


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Re: New water-cooling solar panels could lower the cost of air conditioning by 20%

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Cheaper design by University of Colorado keeps house cool without using any power :!:

Germany will soon have 60 Hydrogen powered trains & solar panels that work in the rain.


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