Transparent Glass Surfaces with Silica Nanopillars for Radiative Cooling

Abstract

The increasing global use of cooling systems and the need of reducing greenhouse effect are pushing the emergence of more efficient cooling methods. In particular, passive radiative cooling technology extracts heat from objects by tailoring their optical emissivity using surface micro- and nanostructuring. Being capable of increasing thermal emissivity is especially relevant for widespread glass structures and devices, e.g., displays, car and building windows, and solar cells. In this paper, we propose a scalable lithography-free nanostructuring method to increase the infrared (IR) emissivity of glass by reducing the high reflection associated with the SiO2 Reststrahlen band around 9 μm wavelength. Furthermore, we show that with an additional thin polymer coating the scattering (haze) in the visible due to the deep nanostructures can be dramatically reduced while maintaining the large IR emissivity. We experimentally prove that our nanostructured surface can extract more heat via radiation emission than the bare glass substrate, while keeping full transparency.