BLUE COLORS FOR CARS DRIVER

Its researchers have been looking into roofs and cool colors for some years. Manufacturing designers looking more closely into recipes for pigmented coatings that maximize solar reflectance colors would find plenty of interesting research into cool colors at the Berkeley Lab. Solar reflective paints can decrease the soak' temperature of the air in a car that has been parked in the sun. When dark surfaces are needed for aesthetics or to reduce brightness, one can use special 'cool-colored' materials that stay moderately cool by reflecting only the invisible component of sunlight. White, silver, and other light colors are coolest, reflecting about 60 percent of sunlight but there are dark 'cool' colors that can also stay cooler than traditional dark colors. An improvement of 2 to 2 percent in fuel economy, scaled to the fleet of light-duty vehicles in the United States, represents savings of gallons of gas in the billions, if these design changes are adopted by the automotive industry. The numbers continue to take on special significance when extended nationwide.

BLUE COLORS FOR CARS DRIVER

In this sense, cool-color cars influence both the driver and the planet.Ĭomparison of roof surface temperatures measured during soaking and cooling trials. Overall, the numbers compiled in this car-color exercise found that using white or silver paint instead of black paint would raise fuel economy by 0.44 mpg (2.0 percent) would decrease carbon dioxide emissions by 1.9 percent, and reduce other automotive emissions by about 1 percent.Īir conditioning in cars not only decreases fuel economy but also increases tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants. The researchers measured the roof, ceiling, dashboard, windshield, seat, door, vent air and cabin air temperatures in each car along with weather conditions in the lot. Each cycle consisted of an hour with the air conditioners off, followed by a half hour of cooling with the air conditioners running at maximum. The cars were run through five identical cycles of soaking in the sun. The silver Honda Civic (shell SR 0.57) had a cabin air temperature of about 5-6☌ (9-11☏) lower than an identical black car (shell SR 0.05).Ī silver (or white) shell would allow for a lower-capacity air conditioner as well. The researchers had two cars in the sun for an hour, one black and the other silver, parked facing south, in Sacramento, California.

The research was published in Applied Energy. Ronnen Levinson, scientist in the Heat Island Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is lead author of the study.

Blue colors for cars