Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and an engineering team at Concordia have found a simple solution for climate change and global warming. They have invented the weather time machine for the cool roof testing they are doing.
The researchers at Berkeley and engineers at Concordia have tested the endurance of the cool roofs in their weather time machine. Cool roofs are made of only light materials and reflective ones too. They are very useful in cooling down the temperature of the place, buildings and houses in cities to help alleviate the effects of global warming. However, they are not as strong as the other materials use in building houses, reported Concordia. Hence, the team has made the weather time machine.
They wanted to know if the old and dirty cool roofs will affect its cooling effect. They have tested it using their weather time machine. It is an apparatus that can put the weather of three years into just three days, stated Phys.org. This newly invented technology has been approved by the ASTM International and was also published in the journal "Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells".
This weather time machine will help not only the U.S. and Canada but also other countries all over the world with their cool roof testing and battling climate change, said Hashem Akbari, professor in Concordia's Department of Building, Civil, and Environmental Engineering. The team has put different pieces of cool roofs into their machine, which then exposes the roof to different weathers like of heat, moisture and ultraviolet light for a day. The very process is like a year of different weather conditions for the roof.
After one day of that, the researchers took it out of the weather time machine to put some soil with a bit of dust and soot. They also put some particulate organic matter and salts onto the cool roof for 10 seconds. The soil has four different types; a hot and humid climate just like in Miami and Florida, a hot and dry climate, the same weather in Phoenix and Arizona and a polluted atmosphere in a temperate climate like in Cleveland, Ohio and the last is the combination of the three. They dried it then back to the cool roof time machine for some rain and dew.
They did the same thing to different roof products like single-ply membranes, coatings, tiles and asphalt shingles. "For every location, we found that weather time machine is about 400 times faster than natural exposure, costs about 80 percent less for testing a single product, can facilitate rapid prototyping and can avoid three years of lost sales worth $4.5 million to $9 million per product," said Akbari.
