Oct 5 2022Reviewed by Alex Smith This year’s Guinness World Records list as well as “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” featured the world’s whitest paint, which can keep surfaces so cool that it could lessen the need for air conditioning.
Ruan stated, “To achieve this level of radiative cooling below the ambient temperature, we had to apply a layer of paint at least 400 microns thick. That is fine if you are painting a robust stationary structure, like the roof of a building. But in applications that have precise size and weight requirements, the paint needs to be thinner and lighter.”
Katsamba, another PhD student in mechanical engineering at Purdue, stated, “The models showed us that the nanoplatelets are more effective in bouncing back the solar radiation than spherical nanoparticles used in previous cooling paints.” He added, “And unlike other cooling methods, this paint radiates all the heat into deep space, which also directly cools down our planet. It is pretty amazing that a paint can do all that.”