Passive radiative cooling of solar cells by low-cost and scalable metamaterials: physical simulation and efficiency limits

Radiative cooling is an attractive concept for future sustainable energy strategies, as it might enable passive cooling of buildings and photovoltaic systems, hence facilitating energy savings by boosting performance and lifespan. The key idea is the adoption of materials that strongly emit thermal radiation in the atmosphere transparency window (wavelengths between 8 and 13 μm) as cooling layers. Significant progress in the field of metamaterials has enabled the realization of dielectric photonic structures with properties matching radiative cooling requirements and capable of going below ambient temperature. However, these structures are rather expensive and appear unsuitable for today’s large-scale manufacturing. In the present work, we have studied radiative cooling applied to Shockley-Queisser solar cells by exploring alternative materials, namely cementitious phases, which exhibit the required properties while being low-cost and scalable. We have determined their emission behavior by electromagnetic simulations and estimated the corresponding solar cell operating temperature by means of a detailed-balance model. The results have been benchmarked against the current state-of-the-art and hint at the possible realization of a new class of radiative coolers based on cheap and scalable cementitious materials.