I’m definitely curious about the self cleaning property, and how easily it is to produce (is the process sustainable, toxic, expensive reagents, etc.) That was the biggest issue with a lot of the previous radiative cooling surfaces. If I have time I’ll try to read into it more.
There was a neat video on how to make your own from readily available material, but not from cellulose, but it had issues with being clean and application onto surfaces. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRnEm-B3AI&t=1s
Yeah for sure, that’s the most interesting aspect of it cause if the surface gets dusty and stops radiating then you have a problem.
That would be nice.
Doing some math here even an aluminium (if this material is fine) foil 1 nanometer thick (if this thickness is fine) with one tenth the radius of the Earth (1% of the area of the Earth) would require enough almost 3 thousand tons. That’s should be doable with current tech within a few years to a couple of decades even if you need a few times this mass to carry orbit keeping equipment although it would be a huge project unless some lighter material could be used.
But if the foil needed to be any thicker/heavier than this then it might be easier to do with asteroid mining/in space production.
Sounds gimmicky. My understanding is that such a material would be very fragile and can’t handle any significant weight, so I doubt its radiative property would be relevant in practice, which is fine since reflection is a solved problem. Biodegradable insulation is a solved problem, too. Unless its insulative properties are exceptional, I doubt there’s much here.
