Tunable Coatings on Various Substrates for Self-Adaptive Energy Harvesting with Daytime Solar Heating and Nighttime Radiative Cooling

Abstract

In this work, tunable vanadium dioxide (VO2) metafilms on different substrate materials fabricated via low-oxygen furnace oxidation are demonstrated for self-adaptive daytime solar heating and nighttime radiative cooling. Because of its thermally-driven insulator-to-metal phase transition behavior, the VO2 metafilms work as spectrally-selective solar absorber with a high solar absorptance of 0.86 and a low infrared emissivity of ~0.2 at daytime, while they behave as selective cooler at nighttime to dissipate heat effectively through the atmospheric transparency window with a high emissivity of ~0.76 to cold outer space. From the outdoor vacuum tests, a significant temperature rise up to 169 K upon solar heating and a temperature drop of 17 K at night are experimentally observed from these tunable VO2 metafilms. With the atmosphere temperature fitted in-situ, the accurate heat transfer model shows excellent agreement with the stagnation temperature measurement, and indicates a high heating power of ~400 W/m2 at 80°C sample temperature in the middle of the day, and a cooling power of ~60 W/m2 at 30°C in equilibrium with ambient at night. This work would facilitate the development of self-adaptive coatings with cost-effective and scalable fabrication approaches for all-day energy harvesting.