Scientists create an eco-friendly paint that mimics nature

Published April 1, 2023 at 5:28 PM EDT

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Color me hopeful, but we have heard about a new kind of paint that holds the potential to cut airline fuel usage and make our homes and communities cooler. How? Well, some of the brightest and most beautiful colors in nature can only be replicated using heavy metals and chemicals. And those paints absorb infrared radiation, making objects covered in them much hotter. But Debashis Chanda, a nanoscience researcher with the University of Central Florida, has created a way to mimic nature's way of reflecting colors without absorbing heat. It's the same way a rainbow is created after it rains. Chanda's research looks at why structural colors, as they're called, may be the future of paint, and how altering the way light is reflected off surfaces could help cool a rapidly warming environment.

DEBASHIS CHANDA: All colors actually come from some kind of pigments which absorb light. Butterflies, birds and a lot of fish, octopuses, they actually can create color based on structure. In all the manmade color, we use a lot of artificially synthesized organic molecules, lots of metal. Now, think about your deep blue, need cobalt. And a deep red needs cadmium. None of those materials are friendly. They are toxic. We are polluting our nature and our whole habitat by using this kind of paint. So one of the major motivation was to create a color based on non-toxic material.

DETROW: It's not just cleaner. Structural paint is also lighter. A raisin's worth of structural paint is enough to cover the front and back of a door.

CHANDA: If you could reduce the paint weight which covers the aircrafts, then actually, we make them more fuel efficient and save significant amount of cost.

DETROW: Lighter, cooler - the applications seem endless. The paint could reduce the temperature of the surfaces of cars and even buildings by as much as 30 degrees.

CHANDA: This cooling effect is extremely important to our energy savings, reducing CO2 footprint, addressing some sort of global warming. So this gives another passive tool that you can actually start covering surfaces with this kind of paint which satisfies our need for color, but also, it keeps the surface cooler.

DETROW: Structural paint is still in its early days and mostly being used in the lab. Its potential hasn't been tapped yet.

CHANDA: Paint is one of the largest thing we consume because everything we are looking around us has to be painted - everything. So that means we need such a big volume of paint. Our near term and long-term goal will be to make it scalable at a reasonably lower cost.

DETROW: That was Debashis Chanda, a nano scientist at the University of Central Florida. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.