ReCool. Passive cooling with selective coatings as a resilient cooling strategy in industry.

Start - end dates: 01/09/2023 - 30/11/2024

Principal Investigator: Amaia Zuazua Ros

Other researchers: José Antonio Sacristán, César Martín-Gómez, Marina Vidaurre Arbizu, Pablo Arias Salazar. 

Participating entities:

• University of Navarra (department CIE)

• Lurederra Technology Center

summary:

Energy consumption for cooling to air-condition buildings and industrial processes is increasing and is expected to continue to increase in the coming years. The energy used to meet this demand can be replaced, in whole or in part, by developing innovative passive or very low energy solutions.

Passive cooling systems for buildings through radiation and convection panels has been a technique investigated in recent decades, which consists of dissipating heat from an enclosed space through panels located on the outside through which the water to be cooled circulates. These systems, so far, have not meant a change in the conventional cooling systems used in the market due, among other reasons, to their low performance. This performance is affected by environmental factors, mainly solar radiation. However, recent programs of study have demonstrated the ability to dissipate heat even under direct solar radiation, due to the use of spectrally selective coatings. This breakthrough represents the most significant step ever taken in the field of passive cooling systems at Building.

The present experimental project aims to develop passive cooling modules with advanced coatings and integrated into industrial buildings in order to improve the performance of the panels obtained so far in previous research. Thus, the challenges of project are, on the one hand, to develop a spectrally selective coating for application in architecture and industry and, on the other hand, to design vertical dissipation modules to optimize both their dissipation capacity and their integration in the Building. To this end, the project is presented from a consortium multidisciplinary that aligns areas of different complementary fields for this proposal.

It represents a first step by the consortium in the application of this area subject of coatings in Building, and in case of success, it would place the team as a national and even international reference in this field, given the few programs of study carried out in this regard in which experimentation at such different scales is considered.

Funding Agency: Government of Navarra, projects of research and development collaborative call 2022