Sustainable passive radiation cooling transparent film for mobile phone protective screens

A brief and scalable scraping method for fabricating the passive radiation cooling thermal emission film as a mobile phone screen protector. [Display omitted] •Straight forward and scalable scraper method for a passive daytime radiation cooling film.•Highly transparent self-adhesive mobile phone protective screen film with cooling performance.•Non-selective plant polysaccharide-based thermal emission film with high emissivity and elasticity. Passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) is a promising approach to address energy, environmental, and safety issues caused by global warming, with high emissivity in a transparent atmospheric window and high reflectivity in the solar spectrum. However, most demonstrations of PDRC rely mainly on complex and expensive spectral selective nanophotonic structures, requiring specialized photonic structures that are both expensive and difficult to obtain. The superiorities of low-cost, abundant resources, renewability, and high value-added biomass resources prompt Gleditsia sinensis polysaccharides (GSP) to be used in thermal emission materials to explore further the characteristics of regulating object temperature within a specific range without any external energy consumption. The three-layer thermal emission film (PDMS3PG3/t4) obtained by the scalable scraping method has high transparency, hydrophobicity (114.2°), and super flexibility. The spectral variations of non-selective PDMS3PG3/t4 (1.0 wt% GSP, 800 μm thickness) in the 3–5 μm and 8–13 μm waveband ranges were discussed in detail, and high emissivities of 69.1 % and 92.2 % were obtained, respectively. PDMS3PG3/t4 was appointed a mobile phone screen film and experimented with a 4.9 °C average temperature difference below ambient temperature, materializing prime PDRC and desiring to broaden the passive cooling technology and reduce the global energy burden.