New generation wall painting in the 4.0 era

In this day and age, you not only choose paint colors to decorate your walls, but you can also consider adding smart utilities that come with the same paint you want.

A seemingly simple material like wall paint has also become a part of the intelligent digital world.

Smart wall

Researchers have found a way to turn a normal wall into a smart device with only a high-tech paint, but the cost is low. This invention was made by a team from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA and Disney Research - a unit of Walt Disney entertainment group.

Yang Zhang, the project leader, said that the treatment of walls with smart paint and sensor hardware named Wall ++ can monitor user gestures and gestures as well as estimate their posture if they stay near the.

This technique uses conductive paint to create electrodes in a diamond-shaped grid on the surface of the wall, then cover a standard rubber coating. By capturing electromagnetic noise in the air, it can also detect which devices are active and their location.

Wall ++ technology can allow users to control smart home functions, such as turning on the light by lightly touching the wall, informing users in another location in the house when the electric kettle is turned off or received. gesture of users playing video games. To get such a smart wall, you only have to spend 20 dollars (470,000 VND) per square meter.

One of the benefits of Wall ++ is privacy protection. Unlike cameras, Wall ++ does not disclose high resolution information of users - instead it only tracks some basic operations, minimizing concerns about privacy issues.

This Wall ++ expectation team is commonly used in hospitals, museums, gyms, schools and offices. Disney Corporation, which owns the technology, has yet to reveal anything more about its plan to commercialize the product.

Wall paint creates electricity

A solar paint that creates clean energy from sunlight and airborne steam was invented by researchers at the Royal Melbourne University of Technology Institute, Australia. It contains a new compound that can act as a semiconductor and catalyze the splitting of water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen.

Thereby, it produces hydrogen fuel from solar energy and humid air. Dr. Torben Daeneke, head of the research project, said that with this simple combination, we were able to turn a brick wall where there is also into a power station and produce fuel.

However, the amount of electricity generated from this paint is not strong enough to be the main power source. Instead, it will be an additional source of solar panels to provide clean electricity for homes.

Son "cooling"

A high-tech paint that helps the wall cool when exposed to sunlight promises to be a new solution to cooling buildings in the crowded, hot city. Technology developed by Israel's SolCold company, using two paint coatings to reduce the wall surface temperature to 10 ° C

Two layers of parallel active coating: the nano filter of the outer layer blocks the sun's rays and the inner layer transfers the heat on its surface into cool light. The special thing is that the more hot the sun burns, the better the paint works.

Mr. Yaron Shenhav, General Director of SolCold, said that if applied to the roof of a building, this type of paint can save up to 60% of air-conditioner costs, saving electricity and protecting the environment. The director affirmed that the paint is "100% green technology" and has no carbon emissions.

Although still under development, many orders knocked on SolCold's door. You have to spend about US $ 50 (1.2 million) to paint an area of ​​1 square meter. Shenhav said that cooling buildings is only a very small part of the huge potential of the paint. It can be put in to cool cars, trains and containers for example.

Son helps blind people

A smart paint is being developed by Ohio State University (USA) with the aim of helping blind people locate in an urban environment. John Lannutti, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, said smart paint provides accurate positioning services for visually impaired people.

Smart paint is painted on the road. The visually impaired "see" the painted line using a "smart stick" - a white stick designed to detect smart paint and guide the way for users. The stick can also be used to inform vehicles, including automated means of user presence when crossing the road.