Staying Cool Without the Air Conditioner and Energy

A team of University of Colorado Boulder engineers has developed a scalable manufactured metamaterial - an engineered material with extraordinary properties not found in nature - to act as a kind of air conditioning system for structures. It has the ability to cool objects even under direct sunlight with zero energy and water consumption.

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When applied to a surface, the metamaterial film cools the object underneath by efficiently reflecting incoming solar energy back into space while simultaneously allowing the surface to shed its own heat in the form of infrared thermal radiation. The new material, which is described today in the journal Science, could provide an eco-friendly means of supplementary cooling for thermoelectric power plants, which currently require large amounts of water and electricity to maintain the operating temperatures of their machinery. The researchers' glass polymer hybrid material measures just 50 micrometers thick - slightly thicker than the aluminum foil fou