Passive daytime radiative cooling
management strategy for global warming
Passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC)—also called passive radiative cooling, daytime passive radiative cooling, radiative sky cooling, photonic radiative cooling, and terrestrial radiative cooling—is the use of surfaces that are highly reflective and have high thermal emissivity to reduce the temperature of a building or other object.
It has been proposed as a method of reducing temperature increases caused by greenhouse gases by reducing the energy needed for air conditioning, reducing the urban heat island effect, and human body temperatures.
PDRC can aid systems that are more efficient at lower temperatures, such as photovoltaic systems, dew collection devices, and thermoelectric generators.
Some estimates propose that dedicating 1–2% of the Earth's surface area to PDRC would stabilize surface temperatures. Regional variations provide different cooling potentials with desert and temperate climates benefiting more than tropical climates, attributed to the effects of humidity and cloud cover. PDRC can be included in adaptive systems, switching from cooling to heating to mitigate any potential overcooling effects. PDRC applications for indoor space cooling is growing with an estimated "market size of ~$27 billion in 2025".
PDRC surfaces are designed to be high in solar reflectance to minimize heat gain and strong in longwave infrared (LWIR) thermal radiation heat transfer matching the atmosphere's infrared window (8–13 μm). This allows the heat to pass through the atmosphere into space.
PDRC leverages the natural process of radiative cooling, in which the Earth cools by releasing heat to space.
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This entry incorporates text from “Passive daytime radiative cooling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.