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Researchers have developed the world's whitest paint that's designed to reduce and maybe even eliminate the need for air conditioning.
According to ABC 10News, Xiulin Ruan, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, invented the paint with the help of his graduate students.
Their goal was to create a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building to save energy and help fight climate change.
The formula they created reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Since the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, walls that are coated with the paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.
“What wavelength of sunlight each particle scatters depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun,” said the university.
According to Purdue, typical commercial white paint gets warmer instead of cooler in the sun.
Researchers found that using their paint to cover a roof area of around 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts.
They also made the paint ultra-white by using a high concentration of barium sulfate.
Earlier this year, the paint earned the Guinness World Records title for "whitest paint" and will appear in the Guinness World Records 2022 book.