Scientists Have Developed the Whitest White Paint Ever Made – Can Cool Surfaces
news.artnet.com
news.artnet.com
I tested the results with an insulated box with an open top covered with glad wrap, and confirmed 11 F less than ambient temp at night, at a variety of humidities. I haven't gotten up early ( or stayed up late ) enough to do a test in the early morning when it's close to 100 percent humidity, but it seems to not be affected by atmospheric humidity, which would confirm it's emitting at that "atmospheric window".
The materials are cheap at scale and the process is probably about as complicated as brewing beer, actually probably less so.
I bought a pack of standard asphalt roofing tiles, so I could paint them and leave them exposed and see how quickly dust, rain and etc degraded the effect. I used the acrylic / acetone / water paint that NightHawkInLight describes, but also tried mixing it with clear coat, and I have a few other cheap and scalable application methods to try.
Film surfaces can be engineered more to withstand dirt accumulation which drops performance, but it may require more skill to apply adhesives on site compared to paint.
In factory, films can be a lot easier to apply due to VOC regulation etc.
Whatever the case, we need this tech deployed.
Jokes aside, I can imagine this having tremendous utility in the desert cities or in the warming north during summer.
First targets would be urban heat islands and airports. Second would be industrial and manufacturing facilities. Regulations and Nimby would likely mean manufacturing and industrial would be more quick to adapt for use.
The case for urban heat islands is pretty straightforward, but the application with airports would be to mitigate the heat trapping that takes place, especially overnight. Exhaust from flights result in more heat being trapped, similar to urban heat island but due to atmospheric effects and not solely due to surface materials and lack of greenspace.
Seems we are going to have to geoengineer in the future, greening deserts would be a silver lining to all the climate and response chaos.
People are starting to study this. Basically it would be like installing artificial snow to redirect the light energy back to space.
The snow doesn't change the energy budget of the earth at night, because there is nothing for it to reflect, and the infrared energy it emits is pretty much like the infrared energy from most other surfaces, and a certain percentage makes it off planet and the atmosphere absorbs a certain percentage.
The skypaint emits infrared in a particular bandwidth which the atmosphere does not absorb, called the "atmospheric window", so a much higher portion of it's energy makes it off the planet. This effect will operate regardless of whether the sun is shining on it or not, it will keep dumping something around 120 watts per square meter off the planet as long as it is exposed to the sky.
Like crop dust with UAV planes? Other than “think of the wildlife/habitat”, why not?
And because in the real world you're not allowed to just say "other than all the environmental damage, why not?".
“Other than all the environmental damage, why not?” all the time. They weigh the likelihood of being caught or not, and do a cost/benefit analysis. They choose environmental damage just for a 1% increase in profit margins.
If they can do it, why can’t a properly funded radical geoengineering activist group do it?
But in winter I don’t want that reflection, I want absorbtion. Any ideas?
I suppose the strategy is to do a calculation for the year, are my summer gains better than my winter losses.
https://www.designboom.com/technology/bmw-color-changing-car...