4 ms·

This is cool. Anything that will help us convert light (particularly from the sun) into a more directly usable form of energy should be a good thing.

• swombat 18y ago
  Funny, and there I was thinking most people were trying to figure out ways to convert (waste) heat into something useful. Heat's not that incredibly useful. Particularly when you consider that, according to black body radiation laws, a body will emit exactly as much as it absorbs. So, this might be useful to get an object to reach room temperature really quickly.
  • hugh 18y ago
    Minor nitpick: it's not true that "a body will emit exactly as much as it absorbs" in general. That's only true once it reaches some equilibrium temperature, which may not be room temperature. If you stick a room-temperature metal sheet outside on a sunny day, it will heat up until it reaches a steady state where the rate of heat absorption is equal to the rate of heat dissipation -- this can be significantly higher than room temperature, which is why pieces of metal outside on a hot day are really really hot.
  • gills 18y ago
    The steam engine and Otto cycle both convert waste heat to kinetic energy. They turned out to be marginally useful. I wasn't suggesting coating objects with an expensive material to collect ambient infrared radiation. I was thinking of solar or solar thermal power, since the article advertises the material as 'tunable black'.