Transparent Wood for Passive Radiative Cooling of Solar Absorbers.

ABSTRACT: Passive radiative cooling is emerging as a sustainable strategy to reduce energy consumption by emitting heat directly through Earth's atmospheric transparency window. Here, we demonstrate transparent wood-based biocomposite coatings as an eco-friendly solution for passive radiative cooling under direct sunlight. We fabricated freestanding, micron-thick coatings using wood scaffolds functionalized with ZnO nanoparticles, followed by thiol-ene in situ polymerization to improve transparency and mechanical resilience. These coatings exhibit high visible transparency combined with exceptionally strong mid-infrared emissivity (∼0.95). When applied onto silicon substrates exposed to direct sunlight, ZnO-functionalized coatings effectively lowered the substrate temperature by ∼6-7 °C. This was pr

SUBMITTER: Ram F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12464995 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature