(ORDO NEWS) — Researchers have developed a new energy-saving paint that repels heat, is available in any color and should last for centuries. It is also the lightest paint created to date.
Inspired by butterfly wings, this paint is pigment-free. Instead, the color is created structurally by the arrangement of the nanoparticles. The team calls it “plasmon paint”.
According to their calculations, it would take only 1.4 kg (3 lb) of plasma paint to cover a Boeing 747 – you would need at least 454 kg (1,000 lb) of regular commercial paint to do the same.
This means that it can significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gases required for flight.
To be clear, this paint was only created in a laboratory, so we are still a long way from mass production.
But the researchers have already created paint in a variety of colors using methods that scale easily, and that’s what they’ll be working on next.
One of the main motivations for bringing this paint to market is that it can also help keep structures cooler: the structure of the plasmon paint reflects the entire infrared spectrum, so less heat is generated. absorbed.
The researchers say surfaces under the new paint stay 13 to 16 degrees Celsius (25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than if they were coated with regular commercial paint.
“More than 10 percent of all electricity in the US is spent on air conditioners,” says nanoscientist Debachis Chanda of the University of Central Florida, who led the team that created the paint.
“Temperature difference is plasmonic The promise of paint will lead to significant energy savings. Using less electricity for cooling will also cut carbon emissions and reduce global warming.”
Currently, pigment-based paints require certain molecules to create color, and these pigments are usually synthesized artificially in modern paints.
The electronic properties of each molecule determine the amount of light absorbed and hence the color of the paint. This means that for each new paint color there must be a new pigment.
Instead, plasmonic paint uses nanoparticles of two colorless materials, aluminum and aluminum oxide.
By placing them differently on top of the oxide-coated aluminum mirror, you can control how the light is scattered, reflected, or absorbed.
A similar process is responsible for the rich color of the butterfly’s wings.
“The variety of colors and hues in the natural world is amazing, from bright colors, birds and butterflies to underwater creatures like fish and cephalopods,” says Chanda.
“Structural color serves as the main mechanism for generating color in several extremely bright species, where the geometric arrangement of usually two colorless materials produces all colors.
On the other hand, with [artificial] pigment, new molecules are required for each color present. ”
Structural color is what makes the paint so light – at just 150 nanometers thick, the paint achieves full color, making it the lightest paint on record.
In this study, the team created a structural paint using an electron beam evaporator that heats the substance at a tightly controlled rate.
This controlled evaporation allows small clusters of aluminum nanoparticles to self-assemble – aluminum atoms are more strongly attracted to each other than to the oxide substrate on which they are grown, so they naturally stick together.
By adjusting the pressure and temperature of the cathode beam evaporator, the team can create structures that reflect different colors.
“Importantly, this pressure and temperature controlled process provides high reproducibility over large areas in a single step, reducing the cost of production and enabling large-scale production,” the team writes in their paper.
The researchers also combined their structural color flakes with a commercial binder, which means the paint will last hundreds of years – at least in theory.
“Normal color fades because the pigment loses its ability to absorb photons,” says Chanda.
“Here we are not limited to this phenomenon. Once we paint something with a structural color, it should last forever.”
This is not the first new type of paint that promises incredible properties. Many of you have heard of Vantablack, one of the blackest paints in the world, capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light.
Like plasmonic paint, this super-blackness is the result of tiny carbon nanotubes, and even blacker paints have since been created using the same method.
There is also an ultra-white paint that reflects 98.1% of all light and promises to significantly reduce the need for air conditioning.
But unlike plasmonic paint, ultra-white paint is based on pigments that reflect light, and Vantablack currently only comes in one color.
However, we still have a long way to go before we can all customize our own plasmon paint colors and use just one tiny can to paint an entire house.
“Regular pigment paint is made in large plants where they can produce hundreds of gallons of paint,” Chanda says.
“At this point, if we don’t go through the scaling process, it’s still expensive to produce in an academic lab.”
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