Urban heat islands, such as Los Angeles, experience more heating than surrounding rural areas, leading to detrimental effects to human health and the environment. “Cool” pigments painted on infrastructure in urban heat islands have the advantage of displaying pleasing colors while also reflecting away much of the sun’s heat in the near-IR region. Prevailing methods to synthesize these types of pigments involve several days of high-temperature synthesis, further contributing to detrimental effects to the environment because of increasing global energy demand. Microwave-assisted synthesis, using a domestic kitchen microwave, is a greener alternative to traditional synthesis methods that can be completed in under half an hour with similar results. Additionally, the rapid heating of microwave-assisted synthesis results in smaller particle size, which can influence near-IR reflectance properties as well as pigment opacity and, therefore, vibrance. Furthermore, a precise chemical understanding of how substituting different transition metals into sites with different types of coordination (i.e. centrosymmetric vs non-centrosymmetric) is not well-understood in many pigment families. Presented will be several transition metal oxides with tunable color and how microwave-assisted synthesis affects their color and near-IR reflectance properties.

Exploring the color tunability of “cool” pigments

ACS Spring 2022

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