Keep your home cool and save energy: Create solar cooler that operate like air conditioning

Stanford University developed a prototype that will help combat the greenhouse effect while saving energy resources. This technology would occupy the same energy of the sun to cool the environments. In the future, solar cooler will not only serve as an alte ative source of energy, but also as an air conditioning system. In view of the sustained increase in global temperature, a group of scientists from Stanford University created a prototype solar panel that, in addition to having the ability to collect energy, allows to cool the environment where it is installed. In simple words, the solar panel operates as energy for the air conditioning. The advantages offered by this technology are promising both for the care of the environment and for the economic savings of those who use them.

How does it work?

Solar cooler work through a process called "solar harvest”, in which the energy emanated by the sun is absorbed and transformed into electricity. With respect to this, there is an inverse process called radiative cooling, which happens when the heat escapes from the bodies to return to the universe. According to an article published in the magazine The Verge, all objects lose heat in the form of infrared energy, which is invisible to the human eye. Even so, in most cases, this energy - added to that of greenhouse gases - bounces off the atmosphere causing the temperature on Earth to rise more and more. However, there is a wavelength of the infrared energy spectrum that escapes directly into space without bouncing off the atmosphere. This means that the materials that emit this frequency, when losing heat, become colder than the air that surrounds them. Scientists from the world of engineering hope to transform this phenomenon into a clean cooling method, in order to leave behind the air conditioning systems that produce a large number of greenhouse gases. The scientists who devised the prototype of this solar panel sketched the prototype in a paper published in the academic journal Joule. In the article, it is explained that the apparatus consists of two parts: a solar panel in the upper part and a radiative cooler in the bottom. Both parts would be mediated by a vacuum temperature regulating the system. Shanghai Fan, the scientist in charge of the project, says that this allows "the bottom panel to work without being affected by the temperature of the upper panel, which makes it lower its temperature substantially with respect to the environment". The upper panel of the device can be heated up to 6 ° C above the ambient temperature. The inner part, meanwhile, can cool up to 12 ° C below it. Both numbers that fill with hope the scientists of this project, who seek alte ative forms of air conditioning to combat the constant increase in temperature on Earth.