Congratulations to Zhengmao Lu, Arny Leroy, Lenan Zhang, and their collaborators in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) at MIT for their recent work on Significantly enhanced sub-ambient passive cooling enabled by evaporation, radiation, and insulation, which was featured on MIT News.
In this work, we present insulated cooling with evaporation and radiation (ICER) that synergistically combines thermal insulation, evaporative cooling, and radiative cooling. Consequently, it consistently achieves below-wet-bulb temperatures with much less water consumption than pure evaporation while reaching 9.3°C below the ambient temperature under direct sunlight. During the summer months, without electricity, ICER can extend food shelf life by 40% in humid climates and 200% in dry climates with low water-refilling frequencies.