The idea of using white paint to cool buildings is thousands of years old. Now, one professor and his team at Purdue University have created the whitest paint ever. It’s so white it even made the Guinness Book of World Records.
Barber has been working on the team led by Dr. Xiulin Ruan. In the spring of 2021, the Purdue engineers unveiled an ultra white paint that can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler in the evenings. According to an article released by Purdue, there are two features that give the paint its extreme whiteness. The paint has a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate, which is also used to make photo paper and to make cosmetics white.
“From the beginning when we were developing this paint, we made a lot of attempts to make the process of the paint development very similar to the commercial process,” Barber said. “A lot of the materials and processes are the same and we are hoping for an easy conversion there."