Radiation cooling system: Limitations, solutions, and future challenges

Radiant cooling technology offers a promising solution for creating an energy-efficient and comfortable indoor environment. However, its widespread application faces challenges such as condensation risks, insufficient cooling capacity, and high energy consumption (i.e., the unreasonable design and application of the radiation cooling system leading to increased energy consumption). This investigation reviews the basic mechanisms of radiant cooling systems, the main factors influencing condensation risks, cooling capacity, and energy consumption, and the available strategies. Methods to address condensation risks include independent control of temperature and humidity, automatic control strategies, anti-condensation materials and microstructure surfaces, uniform surface temperature control of radiation panels, and physically isolate anti-condensation radiation end structures. Moreover, smart anti-condensation based on big data and artificial intelligence (AI) will be one of the states of the art research directions in the future. To improve the cooling capacity, modifications such as changes to the structure of radiation panels and reduction in chilled water temperature are suggested. Furthermore, inverse design methods, localized personalized cooling technologies, and energy storage solutions would help mitigate high energy consumption due to poor system design. This study also highlights the limitations of traditional design methods and proposes that the inverse design combined with the big data-driven intelligent fluid mechanics will be a promising solution to systematically optimize radiation end design and layout. Although significant progress has been made in these fields, how to integrate cutting-edge methods such as AI and big data to solve the three major problems is still a major challenge and one of the main research directions for the future. • Summary of the state-of-the-art progress of the radiant cooling technology. • Condensation issues, inadequate cooling capacity, and high energy consumption. • The condensation risk affects the cooling capacity and energy consumption. • End structure, materials, operating parameters, etc. affect the cooling capacity. • Design and application of radiation cooling systems affect the energy consumption.