Thinking about
#24 - a honeycombed ceiling tile to reduce thermal reflectivity, and how best to mass manufacture this.
Then I realised that this has already been engineered with the production of corrugated cardboard.
Do an images search for ‘single-facer diagram’ - ingenious!
Using the same process lots of narrow strips could be quickly made, and then stacked vertically.
Need to be careful on the adhesive front though since aluminium is very reactive.
Interestingly the world’s blackest material,
Vantablack (which absorbs up to 99.965% of visible light) also traps photons in the infrared wavelength too.
Note that this coating is not practical for this scenario due to cost, availability etc, but it does use the same technique.
Test Data (Page 4) To help explain the graphs:
For the graph on the left, for the x axis say roughly:
10 - 400 nanometers (nm) is the ultraviolet area.
400 - 750 nanometers (nm) is the visible light area.
750 - 1400 nanometers (nm) is the near-infrared area.
For the graph on the right, for the x axis say roughly:
(Note the change in scale, and that there is a gap between the data of the two graphs!)
2 - 3 micrometres (μm) is the short-wavelength infrared area.
3 - 8 micrometres (μm) is the mid-wavelength infrared area.
8 - 15 micrometres (μm) is the long-wavelength infrared area. <- this is the thermal imaging/infrared area.
Obviously corrugated aluminium foil is not going to be as small as nanotubes, but it would be interesting to see what the results would be.
