This new ultra-white paint could replace your AC, the future is cool

Purdue University researchers develop ultra-white paint that reflects a huge 98.1% of solar radiation, could reduce AC needs.

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Imagine a future where houses are painted with a specific paint that reflects virtually all of the sunlight, keeping your house cooler and thus requiring less electricity -- massively better for the environment.

This new ultra-white paint could replace your AC, the future is cool 07

Purdue University researchers have created an ultra-white paint that is not just the whitest paint ever made, but this new paint could eventually reduce or even remove the requirement for having an air conditioner. The researchers began their journey looking to reflect sunlight away from buildings, but it has turned out so good that the team made it into the Guinness World Records.

The new white paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation, while it also emits infrared heat -- thanks to it absorbing less heat from the sun that it emits -- the surface of anything that this paint covers would be cooler below the surrounding temperature, without using power. This is quite the reverse of an AC unit and even regular commercial white paints.

A commercial white paint, when heated by the sun, gets warmer... not cooler -- whereas this new ultra-white paint does the opposite. There are paints available that are designed to reject heat, but it only hits 80-90% and it doesn't make surfaces cooler -- so this new paint is quite the creation.

This new ultra-white paint could replace your AC, the future is cool 08

Purdue University professor of mechanical engineering, Xiulin Ruan, said: "When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind".

How was the paint created? The researchers used a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate, as well as different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint. Barium sulfate is also used in photo paper and cosmetics, but is looking like it could be the key ingredient in the future paint on buildings and homes.

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NEWS SOURCE:usatoday.com

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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