Scalable anisotropic cooling aerogels by additive freeze-casting

Abstract

Cooling in buildings is vital to human well-being but inevitability consumes significant energy, adding pressure on achieving carbon neutrality. Thermally superinsulating aerogels are promising to isolate the heat for more energy-efficient cooling. However, most aerogels tend to absorb the sunlight for unwanted solar heat gain, and it is challenging to scale up the aerogel fabrication while maintaining consistent properties. Herein, we develop a thermally insulating, solar-reflective anisotropic cooling aerogel panel containing in-plane aligned pores with engineered pore walls using boron nitride nanosheets by an additive freeze-casting technique. The additive freeze-casting offers highly controllable and cumulative freezing dynamics for fabricating decimeter-scale aerogel panels with consistent in-plane pore alignments. The unique anisotropic thermo-optical properties of the nanosheets combined with in-plane pore channels enable the anisotropic cooling aerogel to deliver an ultralow out-of-plane thermal conductivity of 16.9 mW m⁻¹ K⁻¹ and a high solar reflectance of 97%. The excellent dual functionalities allow the anisotropic cooling aerogel to minimize both parasitic and solar heat gains when used as cooling panels under direct sunlight, achieving an up to 7 °C lower interior temperature than commercial silica aerogels. This work offers a new paradigm for the bottom-up fabrication of scalable anisotropic aerogels towards practical energy-efficient cooling applications.

Scaling up anisotropic freeze-casting processes can be challenging due to the temperature gradient farther from the cold source. Here, authors report an additive freeze-casting technique able to produce large-scale aerogel panels and demonstrate it towards practical passive cooling applications.