Flexible coated textile with remarkable passive daytime radiative cooling, UV resistance and hydrophobicity performance

Flexible Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling (PDRC) textiles have great potential for applications in personal thermal management, device cooling, and energy-efficient buildings. It is still a tremendous challenge, however, to simultaneously realize ultra-high solar reflectance and infrared emittance for flexible PDRC textiles. Here, a Poly (vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropene) (P(VDF-HFP)) coating with uniformly dispersed aluminum oxide (Al2O3) micron particles and nanoporous structure was designed and employed for the fabrication of flexible PDRC textiles. The composite porous coating enabled flexible textiles to exhibit 0.95 solar reflectance and 0.98 atmospheric window emittance with only 150 μm of thickness. The flexible PDRC textile was used for outdoor radiative cooling demonstrating as a maximum cooling effect of 12.5 °C during the daytime and 5 °C at night. The roughened composite porous structure imparted favorable hydrophobicity and UV resistance to the coating, highlighting the potential of this flexible coated textile as a durable outdoor application. This article has blazed a new trail for simplified and large-scale preparation of highly efficient flexible PDRC textiles.