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Southern US Reaches Dangerous "Wet Bulb Temperature". Here's What That Means
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I've been wondering whether it'll be possible to make skin-friendly formulations of the sky-cooling paints, which might help with this sort of situation. NightHawkInLight just released a YouTube video about a way to make a version of the pigment using items from the grocery and hardware stores, and the final result was Calcium Carbonate nanospheres. It seems like it should be possible to make a skin-compatible paint from this, much like the titanium oxide based sunscreens, with the advantage that this one would actively cool you by about four degrees centigrade, which is really quite a lot in this kind of scenario.
The video in question: https://youtu.be/KDRnEm-B3AI
You could do that. Or you could wear light clothes :)
Well, clothes made with the right pigments might work in a similar way. But regular light clothes aren't enough in a wet bulb event. Regular light clothes can keep you from getting further overheated due to sunlight, but if the ambient air temperature and humidity is such that you can't get evaporative cooling from your sweat, you're still in trouble. Sky-cooling pigments can cool you below the ambient air temperature by up to 4°C even in direct sunlight, which could be life-saving in certain circumstances.
I think one trick to that working is using a very thick coat of the paint. It needs to be thick enough to scatter light like using the same properties as snow. A thick coating like that all over your skin would probable block sweating and create a dangerous health issue.
I wonder. He did need the snow-scattering effect to get the barium-based pigment to work, but it seems like the dense packing achieved by the varied sizes of nanoparticles might suffice for light rejection without that effect. It didn't sound like he re-tested that with the new recipe.
Tech Ingredients also covered cooling paint and referenced the NightHawkInLight Video but they went into a bit more on application. It still needed a thick coat. https://youtu.be/dNs_kNilSjk
It's been a while since I watched that one. I'll have to give it another look. They were also using the barium pigment, but I can't remember if they used the multiple sizes of nanospheres.