materials engineering is a fascinating and really underappreciated field. I love stuff like this
'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
161–170 of 271 posts
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#162You can tell we collectively lost it when white paint is presented as a solution for climate change... You know what's big, white and help with climate change ? The ice caps we're destroying. We won't replace them with paint
I don’t agree with your cynicism. This is a very practical, potentially accessible, inexpensive solution to save literally tons of power. It’s an easy win. Let’s take it and move on to the next area we can make gains in the fight against climate change.
> practical, potentially accessible, inexpensive
Painting 1% of the world in white paint is everything but that.
It's a cool gadget that will be experimented in a few niche places and quickly and quietly abandoned when real life kicks in.
How often will it need to be cleaned ? repainted ? How much will it cost to paint your building's roof, is you building roof even paintable in the first place ? What is the paint made of exactly ? Is it going to leak in the environment ? How much energy/resources are needed to make/transport it ? What impacts does it have on a multi storey building ?
Time will tell but I bet it's going to end up in the same bin as the "massive lithium battery breakthrough" news. /reminder 10 years
They've been talking about this since at least 2005 by the way. Good old hype cycle in effect:
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/10172670
https://www.bbc.com/news/10333304
http://archive.iwlearn.net/unep.org/paint4planet/default.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/16/white-pa...
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#163White roofs are great -- just like snow, the high albedo means a lot of the heat energy is reflected not absorbed.
But.. the ultra-white paint, on a roof? Perhaps it will be ultra-white on the first few days. Rain, pollution, dust, smog, and a myriad of other particulates (esp. in an urban setting) will quickly render it off-white, and bring it on par with existing finishes.
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#164If the goal is to keep buildings cool you don't want your paint to be as reflective as possible in the whole solar spectrum. You want it to have a low reflectivity (thus high absorption/emissivity) in the infrared window[0] where you'll emit more into space than you'll absorb and high reflectivity in the rest of the spectrum. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_window
Better article over at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-whitest-hereand-coolest-litera... says that lots of energy saving paints already reflect tons of IR, a large portion of their (incremental!) improvement over previous paints in this area is specifically because they expanded the range of wavelengths that are reflected.
Ah, great. Paper with an emissivity graph: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01161
Without that you can't really judge the news article.
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#165Someone needs to compile a list of all this fringe tech that I see popping up in my feeds, almost daily now. I know there are techpress blogs that pump out articles like this, but there doesn't seem to be an authoritative compendium of such tech anywhere on the net. I could curate this by hand with 3 hours of free time and some Red Bull I suppose. The reason I want this is because we seem to be swimming in innovation…
>The reason I want this is because we seem to be swimming in innovation, but nobody to aggregate and make sense of it all, and `join-the-dots` of all this tech so we can make even bigger leaps with it. There is. It's called "the market". Each one of those innovative ideas gets tested by their inventors and backers against real world use-cases. Nothing validates an idea or innovation more than someone writing a check…
> Each one of those innovative ideas
On their own though, right? That's not what was being asked. They wanted someway to track things that would work really well together and bring bigger benefits than things could on their own.
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#166Also: Black 3.0, the purchasable variant of Vantablack For sale at: https://www.culturehustleusa.com/
Nice they have a White 2.0 too since last year (up to 99.6% reflective). And as with Black 3.0 banned for Colour criminals ;).
Colour criminals are defined as:
WHY ARE THE COLOUR CRIMINALS BANNED?
Anish Kapoor & the creators of Vantablack for hoarding the material and for generally being rotters.
Dupont for the imprisonment of tech consultant Walter Liew for espionage, after he stole and sold blueprints for their secret titanium white process for over $30million.
T-Mobile & its parent company Deutsche Telekom for claiming magenta as their own and suing small businesses for using it.
Scientists at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source who are in the process of investigating polar bear fur, insect scales and fathers for industrial and commercial applications.
3M for their ownership of Canary Yellow.
Daniel Smith, for buying up the last reserves of quinacridone Gold pigment in the world, so that only they would be able to sell it to artists.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-stealing-dupont-whit...
https://sandrinemaugy.com/2018/04/30/the-final-batch-of-quin...
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#167Someone needs to compile a list of all this fringe tech that I see popping up in my feeds, almost daily now. I know there are techpress blogs that pump out articles like this, but there doesn't seem to be an authoritative compendium of such tech anywhere on the net. I could curate this by hand with 3 hours of free time and some Red Bull I suppose. The reason I want this is because we seem to be swimming in innovation…
www.sciencedaily.com is what you’re looking for. This story, like most others, was published there the same day the research came out: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201021112358.h... And they have an absurd number RSS feeds for every topic too: https://www.sciencedaily.com/newsfeeds.htm
I would pay for an Axios-like native app which repackages science daily for me in a very pleasant readable way.
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#168I bet this would look fantastic mixed with some vantablack, for the greyest grey achievable.
My next model rocket is vanta and superwhite. No room for shades of grey. :-)
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#169White roofs are great -- just like snow, the high albedo means a lot of the heat energy is reflected not absorbed. But.. the ultra-white paint, on a roof? Perhaps it will be ultra-white on the first few days. Rain, pollution, dust, smog, and a myriad of other particulates (esp. in an urban setting) will quickly render it off-white, and bring it on par with existing finishes.
It seems the existing finishes would also degrade along exactly the same curve. Starting at a higher point on the curve might leave this finish, in it's environmentally degraded state, still brighter than the other white finishes when new, and certainly brighter after both are exposed.
Also, if this were that big a problem, it seems that solar panels would fail. It seems that rain often counteracts the pollution, dust, & smog items on your list, washing them off.
Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
#170Someone needs to compile a list of all this fringe tech that I see popping up in my feeds, almost daily now. I know there are techpress blogs that pump out articles like this, but there doesn't seem to be an authoritative compendium of such tech anywhere on the net. I could curate this by hand with 3 hours of free time and some Red Bull I suppose. The reason I want this is because we seem to be swimming in innovation…
I think part of they problem is that whoever invented this paint is going to want a massive premium for its sale. So it'll get some niche industry use until the patent expires and people start painting their desert roofs with it, or whatever else. Apply to this virtually every technical innovation that is iterative. Fundamental breakthroughs allow for a shakeup of the incumbents, iterative ones don't, due to the arch…
I’m pretty sure this is developed and patented by Purdue University (or perhaps a partnership). They don’t really try to extract extreme fees for usage.