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A Boston professor created an invention that reflects the heat off of rooftops and even sucks the heat out of homes and buildings - and the real kicker is that it is 100 percent recyclable.
Yi Zheng, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, created "cooling paper" so that a building or home could essentially keep cool on its own, with no electricity required, according to Northeastern University's blog.
The paper can cool down a room's temperature by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit - a game-changing alternative to air conditioners that require a lot of electricity and money from home owners. //
Zheng's invention works through the "porous microstructure of the natural fibers" inside the cooling paper, which absorbs warmth and reemits it away from the building. The cooling paper itself is made out of common paper.
The light-colored material is part of Zheng's studies into nanomaterials. His idea was first sparked after seeing a bucket full of printing paper. //
Zheng and his team used a high-speed blender from his home kitchen to turn the paper into a pulp and mixed it with the material that makes up Teflon.
The product can coat buildings and homes, reflecting solar rays away from the interior and even absorbing heat from cooking, electronics and human bodies out of the indoor space.
Even when the paper is recycled, it still performs as well as the original. ///
Nice, but saying that it cools buildings is somewhat misleading: it can cool buildings below the temperature they might otherwise be without it, but it can't cool it below ambient temperature, which is half the point of air conditioning. The other half is reducing humidity, and it does nothing for that.
What this could well do is make existing air conditioning more efficient, and that is a worth doing.