Without
the help of compression-based cooling systems, natural
creatures have to make use of other things to decrease their body
temperature to survive under thermally harsh conditions. This work
finds that the silkworm cocoon of Bombyx mori protects pupae from the rapid temperature fluctuations via the randomly
stacked silk fibers, which possess high solar reflectance and thermal
emittance for thermal regulation. Inspired by this microstructure,
the melt-blown polypropylene (MB-PP) with randomly stacked fibers
is fabricated by a large-scale melt-blown fabrication method. For
enhancing the thermal emittance of MB-PP, the surface-modified MB-PP
(SMB-PP) is obtained by constructing the poly(dimethylsiloxane) film
on the MB-PP. As the reason for its high solar reflectance (∼95%)
and thermal emittance (∼0.82), the SMB-PP displays subambient
temperature drops of 4 °C in the daytime and 5 °C in the
nighttime, respectively. Moreover, building energy simulation indicates
that the SMB-PP could save ∼132 GJ (∼58.1% of the baseline
energy consumption) for 1 year in the contiguous United States. Overall,
the bioinspired structures offer a novel pathway out of cooling buildings,
showing great promising application prospects in zero-energy buildings.
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