nuclear-news

Energy efficiency – an old-fashioned but effective air-conditioning technique – paint

Times 28th Sept 2018 , In lists of history’s most significant inventions air conditioning is regularly cited: a technology that lets us live and work in someof the most inhospitable places on the planet.

But what if we had missed a rather simpler solution: paint. Researchers have designed a paint that reflects 96 per cent of the sun’s heat, meaning it leaves a building’s walls 6C cooler than the surrounding air. They said that the paint, which they described in the journal Science, could greatly reduce the need for air conditioning.

In hot countries cooling buildings accounts for a significant proportion of
electricity consumption – 17 per cent in the US alone.

This means that it is a significant contributor to global warming. Although in several Mediterranean countries there is a tradition of painting buildings white,
conventional white paint reflects about 80 per cent of visible light, and
is bad at reflecting that in the ultraviolet and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.

The new paint was made after physicists at Columbia University in
New York noticed an unusual effect in a polymer. When this polymer turned
from liquid to a thin solid film, they found that under certain conditions
it went from colourless to white. It had formed a spongey consistency, from
which the whiteness was derived – in the same way that colourless water
turns white when it forms snow.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0c12b87c-c29b-11e8-b39e-4a881a3e11ca

September 29, 2018 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, ENERGY