Radiative Cooling

It started with [KB9ENS] looking into paints or coatings for passive or radiative cooling, and in the process he decided to DIY his own. Not only is it perfectly accessible to a home experimenter, his initial results look like they have some promise, as well.

[KB9ENS] read about a type of ultra-white paint formulation that not only reflects heat, but is able to radiate it into space, cooling the painted surface to below ambient temperature. This is intriguing because while commercial paints can insulate and reflect heat, they cannot make a surface cooler than its surroundings.

Anecdotally speaking, this painted battery section of a solar recharger gets too hot to touch in full sunlight. But when painted over, it was merely warm.

What really got [KB9ENS] thinking was that at its core, the passively-cooling paint in the research is essentially a whole lot of different particle sizes of barium sulfate (BaSO₄) mixed into an acrylic binder. These two ingredients are remarkably accessible. A half-pound of BaSO₄ from a pottery supply shop was only a few dollars, and a plain acrylic base is easily obtained from almost any paint or art supplier.

[KB9ENS] decided to mix up a crude batch of BaSO₄ paint, apply it to some things, and see how well it compared to other paints and coatings. He wetted the BaSO₄ with some isopropyl alcohol to help it mix into the base, and made a few different concentrations. A 60% concentration by volume seemed to give the best overall results.

There’s no indication of whether any lower-than-ambient cooling is happening, but according to a non-contact thermometer even this homemade mixture does a better job of keeping sunlight from heating things up compared to similarly-applied commercial paints (although it fared only slightly better than titanium dioxide-based white paint in the initial test.)

[KB9ENS] also painted the battery section of a solar recharger with his homemade paint and noted that while under normal circumstances — that is to say, in full sunlight — that section becomes too hot to touch, with the paint coating it was merely warm.

Actual passive cooling can do more than just keep something less warm than it would be otherwise. We’ve seen it recently used to passively and continuously generate power thanks to its ability to create a constant temperature differential, day and night.

What if a building could stay cool simply because of its paint job? We’re not talking about putting flames on the sides. Purdue engineers have come up with a formulation of white paint that reflects the heat from sunlight and keeps surfaces cooler than their surroundings. Depending on the location, a building with this paint on the roof may not need air conditioning.

Radiative cooling paint is not a completely new animal, but the formulation developed at Purdue is quite impressive compared to commercially-available paints that only reflect 80-90% of sunlight.

Purdue’s paint reflects 95.5% of sunlight. It can keep surfaces up to 18°F cooler than their surroundings, even in direct sunlight. Where does the heat go? The paint radiates infrared heat, so it escapes the atmosphere and goes into deep space.

How does it do this? With abundantly available calcium carbonate fillers — the chalky stuff that antacids are made of. The paint absorbs next to no UV rays because of the wide band gaps in the atomic structure of calcium carbonate. Take a brief tour of this amazing paint after the break.

We wonder how many rooftops and roadways we’d have to paint with this stuff to have a chance at reversing climate change. It’s not terribly expensive to make, so the problem shifts to widespread education and adoption. What do you think?

Continue reading “Purdue’s Powerful Paint Could Cancel Climate Change” →