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One of the popular choices these days are adhesive sheets of black velour. Another option is thick dark paint mixed with sawdust.
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I was thinking about car/plane applications. At first thought, it's "that reflects no light that's a terrible idea". Thinking further, the absolute absence of anything itself stands out from a normal background, day or night. Would be a bit interesting to see.
Check out the Vantablack BMW X6 ( https://www.bmw.com/en/design/the-bmw-X6-vantablack-car.html )
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An almost perfectly black and almost perfectly anechoic chamber with almost zero external sound. Peaceful or nightmarish?
Wouldn’t a pitch black room achieve the same effect with much less cost/effort? As far as I know the idea of these compounds is to absorb light, but if you get rid of light to begin with then you don’t need them?
There's a great youtube video called "Darker Than Vantablack" that has a cool demo of light reflecting off of different paints, etc; and at the end he revels how he got such a pure black without vantablack or a darker substance. It's neat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoLEIiza9Bc
Would the human eye see the difference between this and Vantablack? Even though it's ten times darker I feel like the returns would get smaller and smaller. Also, what would 100% light absorption look like?
A hole.
I think it would be cool to walk into a room painted entirely with this material. I bet it would be so disorienting that people would fall down and get vertigo. So weird.
It would just be....completely dark? I had this experience when working at a mine at one point, and if you went down one of the tunnels and switched off your headlamp.....it was absolute darkness. Like, we think that our bedroom at night is "completely dark" - but that's usually not true, that's always some source of light, after some adjustment you can see at least faintly. In an underground corridor without any lig…
Another time I was flying a radio-controlled glider at the beach on a foggy day. There was a big rock sticking up in the middle of the beach. I thought the glider was closer than the rock, but then suddenly it vanished from sight because it was actually farther away and went behind it. Another flight I thought I was about 20 feet off the ground and then it suddenly struck the sand and slid to a stop.
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I know. My "joke" is that the artist could have used it as a scheme to steal a diamond. Not necessarily implying any foul play though.
There's an old cartoon depicting a man standing outside of a Jeff Koons art show with a table full of inflatable animals and flowers for sale. A sign says "your friends will never know the difference!"
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/oct/14/b...
Would these coatings be useful in solar panels? Does the energy trapped/absorbed by these CNTs turn into heat and does it transfer easily to the material its applied to?
Going from 99% black to 99.999% black turns out not to represent that much more efficiency. It's the difference between absorbing 99 of 100 joules of energy vs 99.999 of 100 joules of energy; unless the rest of your system is effectively 100% efficient, it may not even be a noticeable change. It is very likely that other engineering concerns, not least of which is price, is going to dominate this question.
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There's an old cartoon depicting a man standing outside of a Jeff Koons art show with a table full of inflatable animals and flowers for sale. A sign says "your friends will never know the difference!"
Banksy did something similar where he sold art in New York for $60 without indicating they were his work. [1] After this was revealed, some of those works that were sold that day went for six figures at auctions. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/oct/14/b...
I think it would be cool to walk into a room painted entirely with this material. I bet it would be so disorienting that people would fall down and get vertigo. So weird.