RECOOL

Comunicaciones en congresos

• SEB-24: Sustainability in Energy and Buildings. Madeira, Portugal.

The ReCool project (passive cooling with selective coatings as a resilient cooling strategy for industry) has set out to develop a solution to reduce energy consumption associated with climate control in industrial buildings. Today, conventional cooling entails high energy and economic costs and has a major environmental impact. To deal with that, ReCool is proposing an alternative based in radiative passive cooling, in other words systems that dissipate heat passively, thus reducing energy needs.

The central idea of the project consists of integrating thermal dissipation modules coated with advanced materials capable of selectively reflecting solar radiation and emitting heat in the form of infrared radiation into facades. That kind of spectrally selective coating is a significant advance in the cooling systems sector, because they make it possible to maintain cooling capacity even under direct solar radiation, a limitation that up to now had reduced the performance of traditional passive systems.

The consortium, made up of Lurederra and the University of Navarre, has worked in a coordinated way in several stages. On one hand, three prototypes of cooling modules specifically adapted to be integrated into facades were designed and built. In parallel, a functional coating has been developed using nanoparticle synthesis and selection, and a liquid matrix has been designed for durability and proper adherence to the substrate.

To optimise the application of the coating, several tests have been done, adjusting atomisation parameters (flow, pressure, distance and number of layers). Those tests have made it possible to evaluate its behaviour thermally, using heating and cooling cycles, and as protection against UV radiation and corrosive atmospheres.

The tests in outdoor conditions have showed promising preliminary results, confirming that the modules with the coating have superior performance in thermal dissipation compared with modules without a coating, exceeding the ratios of 50 W/m2 of heat dissipation with direct solar radiation initially estimated.

As a whole, ReCool has laid the groundwork for resilient and sustainable cooling solutions for the industrial sector, providing a path to reducing dependence on conventional climate control systems and advancing towards construction that is more efficient and better adapted to climate change.