Cooling capacity evaluation of passive radiation cooling materials

Abstract

Passive radiation cooling technology has aroused widespread interest and research enthusiasm because it can cool objects with zero energy consumption, and even cool to below the ambient temperature. At present, when evaluating the cooling performance of radiation cooling materials, in order to reduce the impact of air convection heat transfer and improve the radiation cooling capacity of materials, test samples are usually put into incubators for insulation. In this paper, the finite element method was used to analyze the influence of the size and material of the common used structural incubator on the radiation cooling capacity of the test sample, as well as the influence of the selection of reference ambient temperature. Results show that the selection of incubator structure, material and ambient temperature has a obvious impact on the evaluation results of material radiation cooling capacity, especially when the ambient heat convection coefficient is low. Therefore, for comparing the test results of different research work, a unified incubator design is needed, including structural size and material selection.