New Paint Can Replace Air Conditioners in People’s Houses

In a breakthrough for science, a team of researchers has managed to create a paint so white that it could ultimately lower or possibly stamp out the need for using air conditioners.

The paint has caught the attention of Guinness World Records as the whitest paint ever made to help fight global warming in the near future.

Common industrial white paints reflect just 80 to 90 percent of sunlight, making it hard for buildings to stay cool during the day. Xiulin Ruan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his colleagues, have been working on whiter paints to “defrost” buildings similar to the inner workings of an air conditioner, but without the use of power. They looked at over 100 materials before limiting them down to ten and tested over 50 distinct formulations of each.

“When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind,” said the research team in a statement. The idea was to create a paint that would essentially reflect sunlight from buildings. Making this paint more reflective, they explained, also made it whiter. Since the paint absorbs less heat from the sun, given its physical features, the researchers said it reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also projecting infrared heat. With immediate effect, this attribute cools down the building far below the surrounding temperature without consuming any power.

The research team claims that if this new paint is used to layer a roof area of about 1,000 sq. feet, it could generate 10KW of cooling power. ‘That’s more than the air conditioners used by most houses”, the researchers said.

What Makes It White?

So, what is it about this paint that makes it so protective? It’s all thanks to a chemical called Barium Sulphate, which is also used to generate white photographic paper. The paint’s different-sized particles help to make it more reflecting.

The researchers demonstrated in an outdoor experiment that the paint could keep surfaces cool at 19° Fahrenheit (10.5° Celsius), lower than the ambient temperature at night. It can also cool surfaces to as low as 8° Fahrenheit (4.4° Celsius) in direct sunshine during the midday hours.

Need Of The Hour

For hundreds and hundreds of years, people around the world have painted their walls and roofs white to reflect heat. However, in this new day and age, with global temperatures soaring, many people are heavily relying on air conditioners for comfort, and forget to consider the means that would prove less harmful to the environment.

The International Energy Agency estimates energy demand for air conditioners to triple in the next 3 decades, a stat equivalent to adding 10 new air conditioners every second by 2050. There is a significant aim to make the whitest paint available for commercial usage which could eventually diminish the need for air conditioners — and hence cut energy use.



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