Sibley School Seminar Series: Yuan Yang - Designing Porous Polymers for Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling
Location
The Cornell Sibley School Seminar Series will be held virtually for the Spring of 2021.
Description
Designing Porous Polymers for Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling
Yuan Yang, Associate Professor of Materials Science in Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University
Abstract
Cooling plays an important role in the human society. It consumes significant amount of electricity and generates 8% of CO2 by human activities. Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling (PDRC) is an electricity-free method for cooling terrestrial entities, which has potential to remarkably reduce electricity consumption. In PDRC, a surface has a solar reflectance of nearly 1 to avoid solar heating, and high emittance close to 1 in the long wavelength infrared (LWIR) transparent window of the atmosphere (wavelength λ = 8- 13 μm) for radiating heat to the cold sky. This allows the surface to passively achieve sub-ambient cooling. In the talk I will present our recent studies on developing porous polymers with excellent PDRC performance. The high density of nano/micropores in polymer leads to efficient light scattering at the interface between the polymer and air, which effectively enhance solar reflectance and thermal emittance. High solar reflectance above 0.96 and high thermal emittance of 0.97 are achieved simultaneously. Progresses on aqueous processing, colored cooling and switchable devices will be discussed too.
Bio
Dr. Yuan Yang is currently an associate professor of materials science in department of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University. He received his B.S. in physics at Peking University in 2007, followed by the completion of his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at Stanford University in 2012. After three years as a postdoc in the department of mechanical engineering at MIT, he joined Columbia University in 2015. Dr. Yang’s research interests include advanced energy storage and thermal energy management. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers with a total citation over 25,000 times. He is a Scialog fellow on Advanced Energy Storage and a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in 2020. He has won Young Innovator Award by Nano Research, Emerging Investigators Award by Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
Open to the Engineering Community