Delta T article : New materials for construction
NANOTECHNOLOGY CREATES INNOVATIVE CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS
David Churcher, Design Consultant, BSRIA Sustainable Buildings Group. November 2014
The challenging targets that have been adopted for UK-wide reductions in carbon emissions and
government-sponsored reductions in life cycle costs have stimulated a wide range of innovation in
construction materials and components. This is on top of design and process innovations that have
made more effective use of the materials and components that are already available.
The NanoPigmy project, which has received funding from the EU Seventh Framework Programme,
has researched and developed some new materials that have potential to reduce both the environmental
impact and the cost of owning and operating buildings. This has been a collaboration between eight
European industrial and academic partners. More information regarding the project can be found at
www.nanopigmy.eu.
Many widely-used construction materials include pigments to provide colour. These include paints,
plastic components, and cement-based products. Some of these pigments have in the past been altered
to give them additional properties, for example high infra-red reflectance or anti-bacterial properties.
NanoPigmy innovation
The NanoPigmy project has taken this further by developing multi-functional pigments with two
distinct properties, apart from colour, in a single material. This approach gives the pigment, and hence
the ultimate product into which it is incorporated, a broader set of applications and the opportunity to
deliver a wider set of benefits.
The combinations of additional properties that NanoPigmy has targeted include the following:
 Thermal storage combined with anti-bacterial properties, for internal paints and partitions that
could help control internal building temperatures and inhibit the growth of bacteria in
hygiene-sensitive areas
 Thermal storage combined with self-cleaning properties, for external renders that could help
control transmission of heat into a building and also reduce the need for external cleaning of
heavyweight facades
 Low emissivity combined with anti-corrosion properties, for external paints and coatings that
could help reduce heat transmission through steel façade panels and also lengthen the life of
these panels
 Anti-bacterial combined with self-healing properties, for internal plastic components to
maintain hygiene and to reduce the effect of damage to fixtures and fittings inside buildings.
These pigments have been developed under laboratory conditions, and are now being scaled-up to
pilot production processes. The commercial effectiveness of these manufacturing challenges will not
be known until the end of the project, but at this stage there are some promising technical results from
small-scale demonstrations of the innovative pigments and the modified materials that they have been
incorporated into.
The pigments have been tested on small demonstrator buildings on the outskirts of Madrid by
Acciona, one of the project partners. Some of the preliminary results are reported below.
Benefits from thermal storage
document1
31 July 2017
Page 1 of 4
Thermal storage was tested in paint, polymer board and cement render. It is anticipated that changes in
internal temperature will be related to the quantity of modified pigment in the final material and the
rate at which this material is applied to the building. So, for example, it would be expected that the
impact of the thermal storage render would be more significant that the thermal storage paint.
The diagram shows the comparison of temperature readings at different times of day and night inside
the two demonstration buildings – one with a traditional reference render and the other with the
NanoPigmy render applied to the outside.
There are two effects that can be seen on this diagram.
Firstly there is a lower temperature peak from the red data points which represent the NanoPigmy
render than occurs with the reference render. During office working hours, this temperature difference
varies between 0 and 3 degrees Celsius. To a first approximation, it would be fair to say that the
application of the modified render is reducing the internal temperature by an average of 1.5 degrees
across the working day. This will reduce the absolute level of cooling that an air-conditioning system
would need to provide.
Secondly, there is a time shift whereby the building with the modified render heats up more slowly
during the day than the building with the reference render. On average there appears to be a 1-hour
delay. This will reduce the amount of time for which the air-conditioning needs to be operating.
Both of these effects will reduce the amount of energy needed to operate the cooling system, and this
will reduce both the cost and the environmental impact of operating the building when the modified
render using NanoPigmy pigment is used.
document1
31 July 2017
Page 2 of 4
Benefits from self-cleaning
Self-cleaning was tested in a cement render, applied to the outside of the demonstrator buildings. The
effectiveness of the modified and reference pigments to shed dirt from their surface was measured by
the speed at which a patch of red-coloured dye disappeared from the external surface of the render.
The graph below shows the degree to which the Rhodamine B dye disappeared from the reference and
NanoPigmy surfaces. Because Rhodamine B is highly soluble in water, it was possible to see
significant results in only a few days.
This graph shows that the Rhodamine B disappeared from all of the NanoPigmy surfaces, with a selfcleaning pigment, at a faster rate than from the reference surfaces. The average level of Rhodamine
remaining after 6 days was 3.78% for NanoPigmy surfaces and 11.25% for the reference surfaces. To
a first approximation, the NanoPigmy surface was only 1/3 as discoloured after the six days of
measurement.
If replicated over a longer timescale, this result would mean that an external render containing the
NanoPigmy self-cleaning pigment would only need to be cleaned at 1/3 the frequency of a standard
render.
This reduction in cleaning means that the cost and the environmental impact of cleaning is
significantly reduced by using the NanoPigmy render.
Conclusion
The exact quantitative savings from these demonstrations are still being calculated. They will need to
be balanced against any increases in either the capital cost or the environmental impact of manufacture
of the more sophisticated material using the innovative pigment. However, it is clear from these
document1
31 July 2017
Page 3 of 4
preliminary results that there could be significant benefits to building owners and operators from using
these innovative materials.
Acknowledgement
This project has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7NMP-2010-Small-5) under grant agreement no. 280393.
document1
31 July 2017
Page 4 of 4