Summers are unimaginable without air conditioners, but air conditioning has massive consequences on the environment.
Air conditioners consume massive amounts of electricity and can leak potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing global warming.
But what if your house or car doesn’t heat up?
Of course, you won’t need air-conditioning if your car or house can maintain a lower temperature than their surroundings under direct sunlight.
A team of engineers at Purdue University have developed the world’s whitest paint that can keep all surfaces cool. Thereby reducing or eliminating the need for air-conditioning.
The super-white paint has entered the Guinness World Records book as the whitest paint ever made
Commercial white paints available in the market can reflect only 80%-90% of the sunlight. This means they can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings and eventually gets warmer rather than cooler.
But the “super-white” paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation and efficiently radiates infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooler than the surrounding temperature.
As per Purdue researchers, covering a roof area of about 1,000 square feet with their new white paint could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. The paint can keep all the surfaces up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 10 °C) cooler than their ambient surroundings.
