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So Raman and electrical engineering professor Shanhui Fan made panels containing layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver. These radiate in a unique way: They send heat directly into space, bypassing the Earth’s atmosphere. The panels do this by emitting heat at infrared wavelengths between 8 and 13 micrometers. To these waves, the Earth’s atmosphere is transparent. What’s more, the panels reflect nearly all the sunlight falling on them.
For the new fluid-cooling system, the researchers made radiative panels that were each one-third of a square meter in area; they attached the panels to an aluminum heat exchanger plate with copper pipes embedded in it. The setup was enclosed in an acrylic box covered with a plastic sheet.
The team tested it on a rootop on the Stanford campus. Over three days of testing, they found that water temperatures went down by between 3- and 5 °C. The only electricity it requires is what’s needed to pump water through the copper pipes. Water that flowed more slowly was cooled more.
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So it sounds like how space stations kick out heat; The ISS uses that sort of thing[1]. You flow coolant through things that heat up, like solar panels or a warm environment, and then you pump it into these bricks that don't absorb heat from light. The coolant warms up the bricks, which emit that heat as infrared radiation. Planetside, I guess that you can't let the infrared radiation be absorbed by the atmosphere, or it won't cool anything.
So, maybe this could take the compression out of our current cooling systems - compress/heat up, expose to outside temp, let cool, decompress/cool, expose to inside temp, repeat.
My main question would be, is it capable of cooling beyond the ambient outside temperature? If so, how? I might be misunderstanding or missing something about how the 'blasting energy away as IR radiation' thing works.
[1]: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/HeatRejectionRadia...