This Special White Paint Could Make A/C Unnessary
More and more new vehicles are equipped with air conditioning, some with automatic control and various temperature zones for passengers. There’s a small price to pay in terms of fuel consumption, sure, but how could you live without this feature on hot summer days?
Well, researchers and engineers at Purdue University believe they have found a clever alternative.
They have developed a new type of ultra-white paint for buildings and automobiles that reflects 95.5 percent of sunlight. In other words, the painted surface absorbs almost no heat at all.
According to their calculations, this special white paint can keep surfaces up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (about 8 degrees Celsius) cooler than their ambient surroundings—almost like a refrigerator does, but without consuming energy.
“It’s very counterintuitive for a surface in direct sunlight to be cooler than the temperature your local weather station reports for that area, but we’ve shown this to be possible,” said Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering.
The paint would not only send heat away from a surface, but also away from Earth into deep space where heat travels indefinitely at the speed of light.
“We’re not moving heat from the surface to the atmosphere. We’re just dumping it all out into the universe, which is an infinite heat sink,” said Xiangyu Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on this project.
Other tests still need to be performed before the special cooling paint could come to market, but the news is encouraging… unless you hate white cars, of course. Also, let’s not forget that a car’s windshield and windows have a strong greenhouse effect that’s hard to counter.