Daytime Radiative Cooling: Artificial and Bioinspired Strategies

Traditional cooling systems have been posing a significant challenge to the global energy crisis and climate change due to the high energy consumption of the cooling process. In recent years, the emerging daytime radiative cooling provides a promising solution to address the bottleneck of traditional cooling technology by passively dissipating heat radiation to outer space without any energy consumption through the atmospheric transparency window (8～13 μm). Whereas its stringent optical criteria require sophisticated and high cost fabrication producers, which hinders the applicability of radiative cooling technology. Many efforts have been devoted to develop high-efficiency and low-cost daytime radiative cooling technologies for practical application, including the nanophotonics based artificial strategy and bioinspired strategy. In order to systematically summarize the development and latest advance of daytime radiative cooling to help developing the most promising approach, here in this paper we will review and compare the two typical strategies on exploring the prospect approach for applicable radiative cooling technology. We will firstly sketch the fundamental of radiative cooling and summarize the common methods for construction radiative cooling devices. Then we will put an emphasis on the summarization and comparison of the two strategies for designing the radiative cooling device, and outlook the prospect and extending application of the daytime radiative cooling technology.