Literally.

Not in the HOA books though...

@@Ramiromasters fuck HOAs, thankfully this material can be other colors.

Until it collapses your house after absorbing enough water during the wet-season.

Not really because it ultimately depends on how it's applied in the buildings construction . Wood and concrete are also hydrophilic yet both are used in siding and roofing applications to great effect, it just means you need to build to accommodate the water. The problem i have with this is with 30 seconds of research you will find aluminum will reflect up to 92.2% of the suns energy (aka heat source) and this is 99.6, that's not a huge enough gain to say it will change anything.

@@wind5250 if it's the exterior layer, which is has to be to maintain the effect then yes it will be a problem. Just like wood and concrete have to be covered by something else or they are destroyed very quickly. For he beetles, holding onto moisture in horrible dessert conditions is NOT a problem. For a home or building it is. You're correct though aluminum will do that. It also tarnishes however so long term it loses it's reflectivity. I'm not sure about the longevity of this stuff.

@@MrBottlecapBill It doesn't have to be the first layer it can be second or even third , even if it was the primary layer it could be applied as paint. Concrete is used all the time as a siding aka stucco , wood is used the same way as well as roof shingles . To prevent the issues that come with water you simply need to add water control layer and a capillary break between the two materials . Tarnish only has a bearing on performance on non painted/ coated aluminum , but you will only see this on damaged or worn areas. We are mainly talking heat transfer which is IR/uv reflectance not standard visible light . If you look at homes in the us from the 40's to 70's you will find millions of homes covered in aluminum siding for all of the reasons this video talks about. You can apply the same effect with use of a peel and stick vapor barrier such as Aluma-Flash Plus or delta vent. Fyi You are talking to a licensed contractor, my specialties are home building and repair .

A base coat of this with some tough varnish would be fantastic on cars in hot regions. Gotta be creative yo.

Fouling is the bane of all of these nano structured surfaces: structural color, superhydrophibic, sticky gecko-inspired, etc. Nature gets around this by continually growing new parts (scales, leaves, feathers) and/or frequent grooming. This tech is cool but ultimately useless for anything other than specialized parts in niche optics.

That's also the inconspicuous benefit of putting solar on the roof, the air flow in between the two is a huge benefit

My first question- what about rain?

not to mention if it freezes the iceshards forming will destroy the structure for sure

I think this material would probably work better in paint than in tiles, for just this reason. A thin layer of pigment on a hard surface won't soak up water like the tiles would.

Those super hydrophilic tiles might be unsuitable for houses in the Nordics, but they will prove their usefulness in the hot weather of Asia. To solve the problem of transporting water to building materials, we just need to separate the roof with some supporting structure. Of course, this is only for the hot areas. Snow in cold weather is too heavy, and supporting structures might not work

And actually, if you live in hot weather, I think it’s much better to use solar panels as a roof. Those super hydrophilic tiles should be used on the wall.

Those weren't spiders. You found the bot factory.😁

I've seen the same here in New Zealand, I call them metallic space spiders! 😅

have no idea why here in tha caribean the spiders have fur coats. caught an 8" one in the bedroom the other day (think it had been sleeping on my hand when the aircon was on, have a half asleep memory of a cold thing on my hand, last time it was a scorpion on my face...i found the scorpion a week later) got a picture where youvjust want to give it a shampoo and brush, like a spider form of joe wilkinson (8 outb of 10 cats). id take chrome nano bots instead. the little ones are very cool creatures.

How big are dust particles? If they're bigger than the nano scale, they won't be able to get into the pores.

@bethanyhunt2704 You're probably right. Dust would most likely be larger. Testing it out in the real world is the only way to know for sure.

or you could just google the size of dirt particles, math actually is reliable, no need to test

@ashleyobrien4937 there's still no way of knowing how dirt will build up on a vertical piece will compare with one on a normal roof pitching. It may not go inside the pores but it can build up over the top and block them.

Maybe this isn’t a problem if those tiles truly take inspiration from insect scales. I mean, insects always look clean, right?😄

Yeah. And they are real, unlike this hyped up opportunity for patents and commercialisation of something which will never perform as they claim it does. It does not radiate in the Atmospheric Infrared window like Calcium carbonate does. So it absorbs longwave heat from the environment. And cannot get rid of it like carbonates do. For their claimed result it would have had to be conducting heat to a cold reservoir below it. It probably absorbs UV too. So wouldn't be much good in the tropics or southern hemisphere. Carbonates work because there is no incident long wave IR photons from the atmosphere that excite their bond angle to wiggle. But it wiggles from ambient heat absorption picked up from air molecules and other IR photo frequencies, and and radiates photons at that frequency straight out into space. Good old fashioned whitewash, would very likely outperform this. As would a pure white limestone or marble tile. The high filler density achieved with carefully sized nanospheres of carbonate is not necessary if you have a quicklime system like whitewash. It forms the ceramic like nano structure by adsorption of Atmospheric CO2.

I came here to say this too. Those pigments had the added benefit of narrow band emissiivity in a far IR spectrum that didn't interfere with the atmosphere, meaning much of the energy taken from the building was also emitted out of the atmosphere (admittedly by small degrees, unless used very widely, which might be the point) not just reflected into the environment, and were simple to make. Also Satellite coatings using stuff like ZnO or Al2O3 (IIRC) could be worth a look for similar reasons. It is also possible to make a roof that keeps a building cool/efficient using well designed insulation and ventillation, with cheap materials like wood fibre (insulative and higher thermal mass) without nano engineering. I imagine though we'll need a wide variety of solutions, and the knowledge gained in this fascinating research could lead to something more focused, more reflective, better tuned, more durable, etc, but it won't have a wide impact unless it can be widely implemented across the '10% of energy consumption' mentioned in the video, and that might mean it needs to be cheap to produce, *and* cheap to buy (not protected and restricted). Like Thunderfoot said in his uncharacteristically balanced summary of the problem, the work needed to address the impact of the industrial revolution on the environment is comparable to all the total human effort that has got us to this point. I love biomimetic products, and the level of understanding in this research is fantastic, and hugely valuable for ongoing devlopment of products, but they have been honed into sometimes unnecessarily complex methods over millenia, and we might be better off with fast and simple where it exists, so we can get on with using it all over the world. But having said that, I'm also excitedly watching this space too. Bring it all on.

There is a commercially available product that achieves your specifications. It reflects solar heat on the exterior and emitts conductive and convective heat on the interior. Let me know if you want more info.

@@timhoeffel I'd like to know more, if you don't mind. Please share!

I heard some news many many years ago and I think in Italy they made a tile that did this like many great ideas it faded away.

​@@thomasbailey6997 Replace "faded" with "whisked".

@@thomasbailey6997 Concept likely works, implementation, not so much.

That sounds like a mood ring... I wonder if that technology would work for that application.

Brilliant! It may only need a tiny bit of current to implement the change, and that could be provided with a small solar collector.

i want to know it to

It's emissive in the IR spectrum, like most things, with the added property of it's emission being primarily in the atmospheric gap ( 11:54 ). I would imagine on reflectivity alone it might be pretty good but a better mirror would do a better job probably - the reason it's useful on earth is because there's not many materials that can pierce through the blanket of our atmosphere, and this benefit wouldn't apply as much if at all in space (there's some atmosphere up there in low earth orbit and it causes drag but i don't think it'd be enough to be insulating in a way where this would matter).

The trick is that the material have to be good at radiate heat/infrared not reflect it. I think the video missed that important part that the tricky part is not just to reflect visible light, it have to at the same time be good at radiate heat. A shiny metal surface is good at reflecting visible light and is bad at radiating heat so it get hot in the sun.

You could just coat them with a simple polyethylene layer. Also they need to be protected from rain and dust regardless and the coating would ideally be relatively infrared transparent. During a fire the PE would melt/pyrolise, opening it up to adsorb the water.

@@BioTechproject27 part of that is a tricky thing to do if you are trying to use them as roof shingles

Look at the beetle?

As I understand it, this material reflects the beams in rather random angles. There are often multiple reflections, vs. a mirror doing just one.

Plug with what? The sand grains etc that make up general dirt are way bigger than those pores. Algal cells are also bigger than those pores. Really, that should be fairly obvious, since the beetles can't clean that chitin better than just wiping the surface, and they're not soiled or covered in slime either. I'm more concerned with that chemical cocktail needed to make it, and the durability of the product. It's not going to be useful if the stuff is deadly to produce, causes something like asbestosis/silicosis as it breaks down in the environment, or has a service life of a year.

Well I guess I waste my money at a car wash from the grime and dirt buildup even though it's parked under a carport and only used two to three times a month. The beetles 🪲 must go to the same car wash I go to I've seen a couple of punch bugs there...

@@steveo5295 You are talking about surface adhesion, which is more down to static electricity and molecular polarity. I was talking about particles physically filling the pores of that 'sponge'. On re-reading, it's unclear to me which kind of 'plugging up' you meant, so I'll use the more generous one and bow out with an apology.

It would be handy if it could reflect it right back out of the atomosphere too.

If the material is used to build a ceramic tile, I would assume that it has a thin layer above it which is very transparent but easy cleanable and resistant to wear and tear.

This is what I was wondering 🤔

Check out Tech Ingredients, he shows how to make an ultra white that does sub-ambient cooling as well.

@@JJayzX also NighthawkInLight, they've been back and forth on this idea

The porosity is in the photonic range, the outer layer could likely be coated and only reduce slightly its effectiveness.

@@mkperez7465 Soot particles (10..100nm) will fit easily into the pores of the material. Coatings have less than 100% transmissivity and they have porosity of their own. Also, the light needs to pass twice through any coating.

​@@ManfredBartzif they dont find way to seal surface layer it will be useless. Outside environment is full of particles of all sizes and you wont be able to clean 3D structure, but the biggest problem is that its hydrophilic, they most likely pulled that whole "oh look it wont have leidenfrost effect" thing out of their pocket to make it sound like feature when its a flaw. Think about it, it will be damper than surrounding environment from all the water inside so invitation for mold and moss, those will actively destroy that surface (both color by filling gaps and damage physically, think moss eroding rock). On top of that if water inside freezes that tile is done for. So any place where temperature drops a single degree under 0° for a single night a year is out of question as a potential market. Places where temperatures never drop below zero are... humid parts of the world where molds, mosses and whatever else loves to grow 😂

@@sznikers You could just coat them with e.g. a simple polyethylene layer, as any protective layer should ideally be relatively infrared transparent. During a fire the PE would melt/pyrolise, opening it up to adsorb the water.

@@BioTechproject27 polymers will get destroyed by UV Also dont focus on that leidenfrost effect, thats a decoy to focus conversation on it. Nobody is resigning from ceramic tiles in building industry cause they have leidenfrost effect, that's ridiculous.

Crush it to pigments? The nano structure should still be able to do it's job.

As long as the wi-fi works I'll happily pay less for my AC use.

You could just coat them with a simple polyethylene layer. Also they need to be protected from rain and dust regardless and the coating would ideally be relatively infrared transparent. During a fire the PE would melt/pyrolise, opening it up to adsorb the water.