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| Kevin Sanderson/Pixabay |
All the heat on our planet is generated by solar radiation aka sunlight. And just like one way of increasing profits is by reducing costs, cooling can be achieved if sunlight can be deflected from buildings instead of being absorbed.
Remember your mother's white-kurta-in-summers-only advice? Ditto.
Yes But How Does That Relate?
The whitest paint in the known universe has been created by researchers at the Purdue University and it has secured its rightful page in the Guinness Book of World Records recently.
This new blinding white paint reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight, which is a significant improvement over the 95.5% reflected by the paint the same team created last year. FYI, on an average, the mirrors we use everyday reflect about 92% of light.While the previous paint was a formulation based on calcium carbonate, the new one employs very high levels of barium sulfate, which is also a key ingredient in photographic paper and cosmetics.
Xiulin Ruan, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue, says this new paint might be most attractive for hot, poorer geographies where air conditioning isn’t widely available, for example, many regions of India and Africa.
He estimates that if a roof of about 90 square metres was coated with the new paint formulation, it would result in a cooling of 10kW. That is more powerful than typical home central air conditioners.
Yin and Yang
Smirking from the other side of the visual spectrum is Vantablack - the blackest surface coating in the world that absorbs 99.9% of visible light.
Bruce Wayne must be thrilled.
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