Up-cycling plastic waste for distributed passive cooling applications

CoolChips addresses two grant challenges of our modern society: 1) Global warming requires new technologies to mitigate the ever-accelerating consequences of climate change.

Passive daytime cooling is such an emerging technology that requires intricate photonic engineering of materials. 2) Plastic waste is evolving as an increasing challenge to keep our environment pollution-free.

We, therefore, will investigate an up-cycling strategy to put used food-packaging polymers to an even better use mitigating global warming.

Consequently, we outline synthetic strategies to equip aluminum laminate polymer films, widely known for chips bags, etc., with an additional coating.

This coating layer combination will be designed so that solar radiance will be fully reflected and thermal radiation in the mid-infrared range will be efficiently emitted.

This unique combination of optical properties is the key to using cold outer space as a heat sink for our environment, day and night. We will achieve this goal by using our knowledge in polymer and composite materials synthesis and processing.

We will further develop scalable processing strategies to glue or weld the individual recycling pieces to large passive cooling foils.

This upcycling is vital for the envisioned transition to end-user products that can then be realized by established roll-to-roll processing technologies.

Foreseeable application cases such as covers for tents, glue-able foils for blinds, or stand-alone parasols will be investigated with established industry partners.

The development of the required processing steps and material selection will be tightly accompanied by an intellectual property patenting strategy and market analysis to ensure optimum exploitation of this promising novel material development.

Overall, CoolChips will make passive daytime cooling materials accessible to various communities providing a green and affordable way to cooler environments.