Colorization of passive radiative cooling coatings using plasmonic effects

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.solmat.2023.112225

Passive radiative cooling is a novel concept and is likely to be important for building and industrial energy efficiency efforts, as it will significantly contribute to the reduction of thermal management costs for electronic equipment. In most studies, radiative cooling devices are not considered for their colors; although to find a large number of users, it must be attractive to designers or architects, who usually pay significant attention to aesthetic and decorative aspects of paints. Since the majority of the coatings reported in the literature are white, there is also a need to develop color-coordinated paints and coatings. Here, we propose an approach for designing a simple structure of colored radiative cooling devices assisted by a plasmonic structures. We show that they can be tuned as desired to produce different hues of colored coatings, while maintaining adequate radiative cooling power. To demonstrate the conflicting functions of color display and radiative cooling performance, we use a bowtie nanoantenna as a color-displaying structure to investigate how the structural factors affect the cooling performance and color display accordingly. We show that periodic high index-low index alternating layers (SiO2–TiO2) on top of a thin silver layer cause broadband reflection in visible and near-infrared spectrums, while to achieve narrowband absorption in the visible region, which leads to the desired colorization, the bowtie nanoantenna is utilized. We report that by changing the structural parameters of a nanoantenna, the resonance peaks are controlled to yield a narrowband absorption in the visible spectrum to create different colors. Moreover, our results indicate that although adding coloration structure to a conventional radiative cooling system reduces the cooling power by around 30%, it is still reasonable high, around 60 W/m2, and is still suitable to be used for daytime radiative cooling where control over the color is needed. Acceptable cooling power while ability to control the coloration make the proposed colored radiative cooling a potential candidate to be used in various applications, both in high end buildings or for thermal management of electronic equipment.