The principle of roofs cooling through the water vapour adsorption-desorption cycle in porous materials is presented. In order to study the effect, porous materials of natural origin or synthesized at our lab, were characterized at the micro-scale with SEM, XRD, UV-VIS-NIR spectrometry, thermal and water-vapour adsorption measurements and tested at the urban scale in a wind tunnel of controlled environmental conditions and simulated sun. In the later, the difference of temperature increase under simulated solar irradiation (300 W/m2) between a highly hydrophilic mesoporous sample and marble dust with comparable reflectance was almost 5 C in the first irradiation hours and reduced to 2 C at the end of irradiation.
Cooling roofs through low temperature solar-heat transformations in hydrophilic porous materials
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Year:
2013
Bibliographic info:
Proceedings of the 34th AIVC - 3rd TightVent - 2nd Cool Roofs' - 1st venticool Conference , 25-26 September, Athens 2013