New paints for energy-efficient buildings in summertime

 
The activity has been focused on exterior building paints, as smart coatings with peculiar enhanced reflectance in the infrared region of solar radiation, in order to limit the summer overheating of buildings and decrease the use of energy for cooling them. The replacement of standard pigments with NIR-reflecting pigments achieves great improvement of the calculated total solar reflectance (TSR) for black paints, over 30%; as well as, it could also increase the solar reflectance of medium shade paints. Finally, higher TSR values means higher IR reflection and, consequently, lower surface temperature: thermal measurements and thermographic images confirm that, the higher the TSR, the lower the surface temperature on the back of a painted support. A vantage coming from this strategy is to broaden the range of colors of the urban aesthetic request, overtaking the current white-cool solution