Eco-Friendly Cooling Technologies See Performance Boost

Eco-friendly cooling technologies have recently seen significant performance enhancements. These advancements not only improve the efficiency of cooling applications but also contribute to reduced environmental impact. Innovative solutions are being developed to ensure sustainable and effective cooling across various industries, demonstrating a commitment to greener practices and a healthier planet.

Boston Brand Media discovered the trending news - Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's (HKUST) School of Engineering have developed a sustainable method to control interfacial heat transfer, enhancing the performance of eco-friendly cooling applications in electronics, buildings, and solar panels.

As global temperatures rise, the demand for effective cooling solutions has grown. Scientists are exploring energy-saving cooling technologies. Unlike active cooling, which relies entirely on energy consumption, passive cooling uses natural processes and design principles to reduce heat without or with minimal energy usage. This eco-friendly approach has gained considerable interest due to its zero-electricity characteristic.

One promising area is passive cooling using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), porous materials that capture water vapor from the air to increase energy efficiency in room temperature cooling applications. However, MOFs generally have low thermal conductivity, making them poor thermal conductors. The presence of adsorbed water molecules in MOFs further reduces their effective thermal conductivity, limiting the manipulation of MOFs' thermal transport properties to enhance cooling performance.

To address this challenge, researchers have focused on improving interfacial heat dissipation between MOFs and other materials. Methods such as adhesion layers, nanostructures, chemical modification, and self-assembled monolayers have been used to enhance interfacial thermal conductance (ITC). However, creating buffer layers with precise atomic control remains difficult, limiting these methods' practical applications.

Boston Brand Media also found that, in a groundbreaking study, the research team led by Prof. ZHOU Yanguang from HKUST's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering introduced a sustainable strategy to control interfacial heat transfer between a substrate and typical MOFs using a water adsorption process. Through frequency-domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) measurements and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, they demonstrated a significant improvement in ITC between the substrate and MOFs, increasing it from 5.3 MW/m²K to 37.5 MW/m²K, approximately a 7.1-fold enhancement. Similar improvements were observed in other Au/MOF systems.

The team attributed this enhancement to the formation of dense water channels within MOFs, facilitated by adsorbed water molecules, which serve as additional thermal pathways. These channels significantly improve thermal energy transfer across interfaces. Further analysis using the frequency domain direct decomposition method showed that the adsorbed water molecules not only activate high-frequency vibrations but also increase the overlap of vibrational density of states between the substrate and MOF, enhancing thermal energy dissipation from the substrate to MOF, highlighting the role of adsorbed water molecules.

"This innovative study not only offers new insights into thermal transport across MOFs and other materials but also promises to enhance cooling applications involving MOFs. By leveraging the water adsorption process, our team has achieved a breakthrough in manipulating interfacial heat transfer, paving the way for more efficient cooling technologies," said Prof. Zhou.

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Source: sciencedaily‍