The World’s Whitest Paint Formulated with Thinner, Lighter Nanoplatelets; This Nanotechnology Saves More Money, Time, and Energy

Researchers at Purdue University who formulated the world's whitest paint as seen in this year's Guinness World Records and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," have developed a new formulation that's lighter and thinner, making it ideal for radiating away from cars, airplanes, and trains.

This paint, a Phys.org report said, is keeping the surface very cool so that it could decrease the need for air conditioning.

According to Purdue professor of mechanical engineering and developer of the paint, Xiulin Ruan, he has been contacted by everyone from the spacecraft industry to architects, to businesses that manufacture clothes and shoes.

These people, he said, mostly asked him two questions. The first is, where can they buy the paint, and the second is if it can be made thinner.

Original Formulation of the World's Whitest Paint

Originally, the world's whitest paint used nanoparticles of barium sulfate to reflect 98.1 percent of sunlight, cooling outdoor surfaces higher than 4.5 degrees Celsius below ambient temperature.

All a user has to do is cover the roof using that paint, and he could essentially cool his home with much less air conditioning. There's a problem, though.

Ruan explained, to achieve this radiative cooling level below the ambient temperature, there is a need to apply a layer of paint at least 400 microns thick.

This, the professor also said, is fine if one is painting a robust stationary structure, like a building roof.

However, in applications with accurate size and weight requirements, the paint has to be lighter and thinner.

The Need for Lighter, Thinner Paint

The need for the paint to be lighter and thinner is the reason Ruan's team started to experiment with other materials, pushing the limits of the capability of the materials to scatter sunlight.

Their latest formulation is a nanoporous paint mixing hexagonal boron nitride as the pigment, a substance often used in lubricants.

This newly formulated paint achieves almost the same benchmark of solar reflectance, at 97.9 percent with only one 150-micron layer of paint.

According to Purdue PhD mechanical engineering student Andrea Felicelli, Hexagonal boron nitride has a high refractive index, which results in a strong scattering of sunlight.

Felicelli, who worked on the project presented in the research published in Cell Reports Physical Science added, this material's particles also have a distinctive morphology which is called "nanoplatelets."

Lighter Paint

Ioanna Katsamba, another PhD student in mechanical engineering at Purdue, ran computer simulations to further understand if the nanoplatelet morphology provides any benefits.

The models showed that nanoplatelets are more effective in bouncing back the solar radiation compared to the spherical nanoparticles used in past cooling paints, Katsamba explained.

The paint incorporates voids of air, too, which is making it highly porous on a nanoscale. This lower density, along with the thinness, provides another huge benefit, and that's the reduced weight.

The newer paint is weighing 80 percent less than barium sulfate paint yet achieves almost identical solar reflectance.

No Need for Air Conditioning

According to a professor of mechanical engineering and an expert in inkjet printing George Chiu, from Purdue, this light weight is opening the doors to all types of applications.

Now, he continued, it has the potential to cool the airplanes, trains, or cars' exteriors. An airplane that sits on the tarmac on a hot summer day won't need to run its air conditioning as hard to cool the inside, "saving large amounts of energy," the Purdue report specified.

Report about the World's Whitest Paint is shown on Mashable's YouTube video below:

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