Solar and Thermal Radiation-Modulation Materials for Building Applications

Regulation of solar and thermal radiation of building envelope shows huge energy-saving potentials. Existing reviews mainly focus on the materials with fixed solar and thermal optical properties. Although there are reviews reporting the materials with modulated optical properties (e.g., radiative cooling materials with modulating thermal emissivity while maintaining high solar reflectance), they merely focus on either solar or thermal radiation modulation, which can provide limited or even negative building energy savings and thus may mislead the researchers to design low energy-efficient materials in practice. To help gain a holistic understanding of the state-of-the-art solar and thermal radiation-modulation materials (STRMMs) and guide researchers to develop more effective STRMMs for maximum building energy savings, here the STRMMs are reviewed in three categories, solar radiation modulation, thermal radiation modulation, and synergetic solar and thermal radiation modulation. In the former two categories, only single solar or thermal optical property is modulated while in the third category both solar and thermal optical properties are modulated. For STRMMs in each category, their working principles, representative examples, potential applications and future perspectives are compared and elaborated.