Car Paint Changes With Temperature

PlayfullyClever writes "It's now common to build materials which can change colors depending on their surrounding environment because of progresses made in colloid chemistry. But now, German researchers have gone a step further. They've used ion bombardment and gold metallisation to produce new particles whose bonding behavior can be chemically tailored. This could lead to new shimmering car finishes which can change with temperature or humidity, new cosmetics, but more importantly, to new applications in optical data processing"

Comments

Police car chases

[cciRRus]

They have just made police car chases a lot more harder, and interesting as well!

Sounds good but...

[Capeman]

...would major car manufacturers use it on their car models?

Wow.. they invented something that already exists.

[Torawk]

Well I don't know if it works the same way but there is temp sensitive automotive paint you can buy now:

http://www.alsacorp.com/products/xposurepaint/xpos urepaint_prodinfo.htm

-Torawk

Re:Computer cases!

[pickyouupatnine]

Well.. anything with a temperature regulation requirement. I suppose the question would be, what sort of temperature constraints do these paints work under? Or can they be 'configured' to work under any fixed range?

Alternative Automotive

[Associate]

Paint parts of the car engine. I wouldn't mind knowing that when my intake manifold turns from white to red that it is at normal operating temperature. But if it should happen to turn purple, it's running too hot.

Re:Alternative Automotive

[rbinns]

This would actually be a practical use of this paint. In racing, when a team needs to quickly diagnose an engine problem clearly as a result of a bad cylinder (bad spark plug), they will put chalk streaks on the headers and see which one melts the slowest, thus pointing to the problem. If they could create a powder coat with the same properties and paint even a small part of the headers, one could visually inspect for misfiring cylinders and, if controlled well enough, could quantify cylinder-to-cylinder variations visually.

intercoolers & radiators

[doubtless]

Actually this might be useful if it's coated on radiators or intercoolers for testing and comparison purposes. You can visually inspect the efficiency of the product.

Same old game...

[Anonymous Coward]

How long has Roland Piquepaille been working for ZDNet? Is this news to anyone but me?

Re:we had this years ago

[LordLucless]

Not only awesome, but therepeutic.

When I was a kid, I had chickenpox. My case was an especially severe one, and I was bedridden for a while with high fevers, which we kept down through medication. I just lay in bed in my hypercolour shirt, and when it started to change colour (due to the fever beginning to rise), Mum could tell the meds had worn off and I needed another dose. Better than mucking around with thermometers every half hour or so.

Re:I don't get it

[ozmanjusri]

Maybe it's just me, but what's so great about using this as car paint?

Having cars which turn white or reflective in summer and dark in winter could be a huge energy saver.

Re:Hotwheels: Now in full size!

[Kadin2048]

Yeah this is exactly what I was going to say. I definitely had a whole set of these things: the changes were pretty dramatic, too. I remember one car could go from dark blue to white in less than a second if you dropped it from warm water into ice water.

I wonder why this is such a big deal now? Seems like the Hot Wheels guys had it figured out. Maybe their patent just expired?

I wonder if the paint ever wears out, or stops working after a certain number of cycles or amount of time.