A light-activated, water and titanium dioxide-based “self-cleaning and smog-eating” coating has won the Popular Science 2011 “Best of What’s New” in green technology award.
The phototcatalytic coating, manufactured by Pureti Inc. (New York), can be spray-applied on building rooftops, solar panels and windows, the company says. It is reported to decrease smog-causing pollutants by 50%.
Popular Science reviews thousands of new products and innovations each year to select 100 winners in 11 categories for inclusion in its annual “Best of What’s New” issue.
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What will happen as the drop of paint dries? Why should we care?
“In the same way, you may ask, ‘Why should you climb a mountain?’” Mahadevan says. “Some people do it for the challenge, but there is another aspect to it, and that is that you can actually see around you. You can see where you are.” But the path straight up the mountain may be too hard. “The difficulty could be technical, or experimental, or it could be mathematical—it doesn’t really matter.” But then, he continues, you see a little hill, and think, “Maybe I’ll climb up the hill. I will still be able to see around me—maybe not as far as from a mountain, but perhaps, once I get up there, I will find a path from that hill to a larger hill, and so on, from which I will be able to see the range, to understand the lay of the land, and know how to approach questions of a similar kind.”
So with the paint drop. As it dries, a skin will form. That is the natural consequence of liquid solvent leaving the surface fastest. “Now you have a skin, which is covering a drop, which is sitting on a surface, and you want to remove more liquid from inside. That is like drying a raisin,” says Mahadevan. When you remove some of the volume from beneath a fixed amount of surface skin, “the only thing the skin can do is wrinkle.”
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Check out this clip from the TV show How It’s Made on house paint.
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Unpredictable weather can make deadlines hard to meet and keep work schedules in constant change, causing financial uncertainty and making late-season contracts a risky proposition.
Not long ago, all it took was an unexpected cold front to throw a project off track: most exterior latex paints could be applied only at temperatures above 50° F. Painting contractors in the cold or mountainous regions of the West were used to curtailing their exterior painting seasons, turning down late season contracts and waiting until spring was well along before taking the ladders and brushes outside again. In fact, there are some places in the upper Northwest, where chill and damp are almost a year-around problem, making exterior work a very uncertain proposition, except in the warmest summer months.
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