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Black Blacker Than Vantablack
- Jaygles 7y agoWould these coatings be useful in solar panels? Does the energy trapped/absorbed by these CNTs turn into heat and does it transfer easily to the material its applied to?
- bjoli 7y agoI can't say anything specific to this specific black, but the previous blackest black all had degradation problems which made them unsuitable.
- jerf 7y agoGoing from 99% black to 99.999% black turns out not to represent that much more efficiency. It's the difference between absorbing 99 of 100 joules of energy vs 99.999 of 100 joules of energy; unless the rest of your system is effectively 100% efficient, it may not even be a noticeable change. It is very likely that other engineering concerns, not least of which is price, is going to dominate this question.
- Zelizz 7y agoThe article does mention that it's more durable than vantablack, so perhaps more suitable for a space-based project (if it turns out a really black material is useful for a solar panel of sorts).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thereisnospork 7y agoMore likely to find use in something like optics, or cameras, where removing any and all stray light is desirable to reduce noise. There are a few uses for radiative heat exchangers, so its possible it could also find use there.
- m4r35n357 7y agoAt least they aren't copper nanotubes ;) OK I'll get my coat.
- tito 7y agoI love carbon and carbon materials. Here's an amazing clip showing Vantablack. It's so dark it looks like an optical illusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2x0L4YAuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2x0L4YAuU And apparently this stuff is blacker!
- criddell 7y agoI just watched that and at the end they state that you can't buy it because it's subject to UK export controls. The Vantablack website confirms this: > In order to comply with UK export control regulations we are required to verify the identity and credentials of potential clients and the nature of their proposed use of Vantablack. Only verified companies, research facilities and educational establishments can order a sample of Vantablack. The coating is not available to private individuals at this time and we can’t accept orders from private email addresses. Assuming it isn't because of it's chemical compositions, why would this be controlled?
- jbay808 7y agoIt presumably has military applications, such as coating stealthy satellites.
- xori 7y agoCome on journalists, you say they published it, but you don't link to it. Where is the whitepaper?
- tito 7y agoWould love to see it! I don't see anything referenced on Prof Wardel's sites yet unfortunately: http://necstlab.mit.edu/publications http://necstlab.mit.edu/publications http://isn.mit.edu/strategic-research-areas http://isn.mit.edu/strategic-research-areas
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ctdonath 7y agoA white paper on ... black.
- nyankosensei 7y agoThis appears to be the paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.9b08290 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.9b08290
- fredley 7y agoQuick, before Anish Kapoor finds out.
- asdfman123 7y ago> Strebe has coated a $2 million (£1.6 million) 16.78-carat natural yellow diamond in the material Wouldn't it have been smarter to, say, make a glass replica, coat that, and pocket the $2 million diamond?
- chrisseaton 7y agoIt's a piece of art - you could reduce the cost in many ways but it's subjective whether you'd be achieving the same thing as it doesn't have any intrinsic value except for how people appreciate it.
- asdfman123 7y agoI know. My "joke" is that the artist could have used it as a scheme to steal a diamond. Not necessarily implying any foul play though.
- rhizome 7y agoThere's an old cartoon depicting a man standing outside of a Jeff Koons art show with a table full of inflatable animals and flowers for sale. A sign says "your friends will never know the difference!"
- v64 7y agoBanksy did something similar where he sold art in New York for $60 without indicating they were his work. [1] After this was revealed, some of those works that were sold that day went for six figures at auctions. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/oct/14/banksy-central-park-new-york-video https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/oct/14/b...
- hobofan 7y agoAnd that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you launder money.
- chrisa 7y agoThere's a great youtube video called "Darker Than Vantablack" that has a cool demo of light reflecting off of different paints, etc; and at the end he revels how he got such a pure black without vantablack or a darker substance. It's neat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoLEIiza9Bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoLEIiza9Bc
- jcims 7y agoThe Action Lab! The first time I saw his channel I honestly didn't take the guy too seriously...but he is super creative and has some really cool ideas that most people could do at home if they wanted to.
- chongli 7y agoI think it would be cool to walk into a room painted entirely with this material. I bet it would be so disorienting that people would fall down and get vertigo. So weird.
- xeromal 7y agoYeah, I'd love to try that out. Imagine waking up in a room painted with that.
- thaumaturgy 7y agoHow about an anechoic chamber (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI) painted in this stuff?
- okcando 7y agoAn almost perfectly black and almost perfectly anechoic chamber with almost zero external sound. Peaceful or nightmarish?
- Nextgrid 7y agoWouldn’t a pitch black room achieve the same effect with much less cost/effort? As far as I know the idea of these compounds is to absorb light, but if you get rid of light to begin with then you don’t need them?
- jbay808 7y agoI guess the main difference would be your ability to see your own body, and the light source. Darkness is probably more disorienting, but also more familiar.
- okcando 7y agoOK, wise guy. There's a single bare lightbulb suspended out of reach in the void. The walls feel like ScotchBrite though you can't see them. You aren't wearing any clothes. The room begins to rotate slowly as if it were a large tumble drier, rolling you off your feet. The walls gradually turn red. Peaceful or nightmarish?
- holy_city 7y agoI feel like they missed the opportunity to name it None More Black [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSkGtW-fQ3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSkGtW-fQ3s
- Symmetry 7y agoI'd like one of these to be named fuligin as in The Shadow of the Torturer.
- gabrielbln 7y agoWe developed an ultrablack fabric and totally missed that opportunity. But then people pointed me towards the book when we did an Iama on reddit and what an excellent read!
- icsllaf 7y agoWould the human eye see the difference between this and Vantablack? Even though it's ten times darker I feel like the returns would get smaller and smaller. Also, what would 100% light absorption look like?
- axaxs 7y agoIn the right environment - the absence of anything. Like a piece was cutout of your vision. Which, to be honest, this resembles as well.
- jbay808 7y agoIn other words, you have to crank up the light source to be 10x brighter to make it reflect as much as vantablack does. I think the returns are always there when the improvements are on a log scale like that, assuming you care about darkness in the first place.
- virgilp 7y agoShine a very powerful laser on it, and yes, the human eye will be able to tell the difference
- jcims 7y ago>Also, what would 100% light absorption look like? A hole.
- redder92 7y agoI believe this is the paper in question: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b08290 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b08290
- redder92 7y agoMore than an order of magnitude lower reflectance compared to VANTABLACK and NIST VANTA
- anoncow 7y agoIn a room with the walls coated with vantablack, a vantablack cloak would be an invisibility cloak.
- jpindar 7y agoIf you want to see something very black, look at the side of a stack of razor blades or x-acto knife blades. The individual blades are shiny, but the geometry of the stack makes it absorb almost all the light hitting it.
- MrEldritch 7y agoThis is, in fact, the same principle behind how Vantablack works!
- ksynwa 7y agoFound a small blog post about it since I was wondering what it looks like: https://erossel.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/beamdump/ https://erossel.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/beamdump/
- kazinator 7y agoAnother deep black is a small opening (the only one) into a large, hollow object. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohlraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohlraum
- gattr 7y agoAn interesting usage example for very black materials (which are required to be effective also at grazing incidence angles) is flocking the insides of amateur telescopes. Not that it's always necessary, but can help in some poor designs where the light beam might reflect off some optical tube elements etc. (which results in a decreased overall contrast). One of the popular choices these days are adhesive sheets of black velour. Another option is thick dark paint mixed with sawdust.
- kazinator 7y ago"It's like, 'how much more black could this be?' and the answer is 'None. None more black.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_the_Glove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_the_Glove
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gabrielbln 7y agoI am concerned with this subject on a daily basis and this is the most civilized and educated discussion I saw until now. Refreshing, really. Thank you
- splitbrain 7y agoDoes anyone know how stable these coatings are in real life? How easy is it to dust off or wet clean one of those super black coatings? How well would it take daily touching?