Ultra-white ceramic cools buildings with record-high 99.6% reflectivity::undefined
You know what also cools houses down super efficiently?
Trees
Excellent - how many trees can I grow on my roof? Can they be retrofitted?
/s
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I can guarantee that a Rooftop Terrace garden cuts down almost 40% to 60% heat ever reaching the ceiling. If you have enough cover with smaller plants under larger bushes/shrubs/small trees then there will be a cool breeze around the terrace, provide nesting places for small birds and animals, a pocket of nature in an otherwise concrete heat jungle.
The problem is who can afford to maintain the Terrace garden is the bigger challenge. Constantly checking soil, composting, watering, maintenance and just time+expense is usually beyond a lot of folks.
Green roof, looks cool, usable space, and helps with cooling. Just damned expensive.
Trees? Not many. Grasses, herbs, wildflowers, and shrubs? Tons of them. And you can pretty easily retrofit over an existing sloped roof. And the weight is no more than a tiled roof.
You know what cools roofs and generates electricity? Magic!
Another trick: bifacial panels oriented to pick up the reflected light from highly reflective roofs
What about Ultra white ceramic trees?
They also dampen noise
but trees look gross
NightAHawkinLight on youtube has been working on something similar. same kind of snow-like nanostructure to reflect light away, but with the added benefit of a paint that emits light in a wavelength that travels through the atmosphere without interacting with any of it.
so if you point a painted tile at the sky it will actually cool below ambient temperature, it’s pretty wild https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3bJnKmeNJY
In other news, snow blindness is on the rise in suburbia.
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Probably illegal here because of the high reflective value. Depending on the sun’s position, it could dazzle and blind people, e.g. people driving cars or riding bikes. I know that for this reason, shiny metal roofs are not allowed.
There is a difference between mirror like reflection and diffuse reflection. Mirror reflection is what you get with metal roofs which beam the sun directly to a target resulting in one spot being blinded. Diffuse reflection will spread it around, resulting in more light all around which is what we can handle as humans.
It’s not visibly reflective. Yes, it’s white, but it’s cool to the touch because the majority of the energy is radiated out into space via non-visible wavelengths. Someone has already posted a great YouTube video from Night Hawk In Light in a comment where he explains how this tech works and makes his own paint!
I have aluminium foil covering my windows in summer and that doesn’t blind anyone by far, even in full sunlight.
Not everything reflecting is a mirror.
Is this what they meant about a “bright future ahead of us”?
Would we ever be able to use a material like this to reflect a significant enough portion of the light falling on Earth to reduce the total heat imparted by sunlight in a meaningful way? Could we use this as defacto ice caps to perhaps reduce global temperatures in any real way?
Probably yeah, but more likely it would have to be atmospheric and not surface based. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it was estimated that the global temp dropped about 0.5 degrees C over the ensuing year due to the ash cloud blocking the sun
So the actual solution to climate change is to light everything on fire so the smoke cover cools down earth
Ah, the Dinosaurs solution.
Imperial March begins to play
My thoughts exactly at first glance! At least, now we know why some people think storm troopers are so cool.
Just a video on how to make high-reflective paint.
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It looks like this reflects and scatters the light, rather than reflects and focuses it. Otherwise it would look like a mirror, not a ceramic.
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