Vantablack inspires awe and disquiet. When BMW used this “blackest black” paint on one of its 2019 concept cars, the BMW X6, the German automaker noted that any surface coated in this carbon nanotube-based emulsion “loses its defining features to the human eye, with objects appearing two-dimensional.” The result, BMW added, “can be interpreted by the brain as staring into a hole or even a void.” Vantablack never made it onto a commercial BMW vehicle, becoming instead a glare-reduction coating proposed for satellites and spookier applications, like stealth submarines. But that hasn’t deterred Singapore-based coatings developer Nipsea Group, whose R&D wing has now announced a more resilient blacker-than-black paint that it hopes will meet China’s burgeoning demand for deep-black luxury vehicles. Nipsea’s Vantablack-inspired composite, the researchers said, has proven capable of absorbing an average of 99.9% of all visible light wavelengths. This new “ultra-black coating,” as the team wrote in its new paper for the journal Matter & Light, also remained “notably stable” even after humidity and water resistance tests—qualifying it for “application as ultra-black automotive coating.”
Altered carbon Liu and his team benefited from a natural attraction between carbon black and carbon nanotubes (CB-CNT) called a pi-interaction. This helped the particles line up in a “connecting-the-dots” structure within the paint mixture. “CB-CNT ultrablack coating possesses a unique structural light-trapping morphology,” the team wrote in its new study, “endowing it with a superior light-absorbing capacity and a higher level of blackness compared to conventional CB black coating.”
