ASU students create groundbreaking 'sunscreen' for roofs that lowers energy costs
TEMPE, Ariz. - A new product developed by two ASU students is being called sunscreen for buildings. It’s a new type of roof coating that essentially freezes and unfreezes during the day.
Monday, Nov. 18, was a nice day in Phoenix with temperatures in the 60s – but on the roof, it heats up, even on a day like this.
These ASU grads have created a product already being used on commercial buildings in the Southwest that they believe will help roofs last a decade longer and keep our buildings much cooler.
"Basecoat, topcoat, it's making it seamless," Matthew Aguayo said, explaining a new roof coating unlike any other.
He and Aashay Arora spend hours at Arizona State University offices together daily testing and retesting their coating. They developed it as doctorate students and started the company EnKoat after they graduated.
"We didn’t want to leave all that research behind us and go work in corporate, so we were like, how can we use this technology and make the biggest impact?" Arora said.
The product looks like blue goo, and that’s the magic of it. Inside it are millions of particles they’ve developed at ASU that they say act like ice packs.
It freezes at night and cools during the day.
"I’ve actually formulated it to resist UV and IR. Our second layer, that’s our thermal barrier, so any heat that wants to come into the building, or wants to escape it, hits this barrier, and it stays trapped. It acts like a blocker," Aguayo said.
It’s a brand-new type of commercial roofing. It has to be tested, pulled and tugged to find its strength. Every batch is tested and retested.
They coated a few classrooms and the results were better than expected.
"When we did it, we ran that for 12 months, and we collected data on the performance, and we saw a 25 to 30% reduction in heating and cooling costs," Arora said.
That's up to a 30% drop in cooling bills.
Inside the lab, they developed a heat box to mimic the desert sun that they’ve used thousands of times.
"Every mix and batch we make, we tested every competitor we benchmark against, so this has been used quite a lot," Aguayo said.
Now, SRP is testing the coating on a roof at ASU's polytechnic campus in the spring to see if they can offer rebates for companies for switching to it.
Aguayo says the heat isn’t going anywhere, so finding solutions like this matter.
"Into the hundreds late in October in Arizona, so this problem is not going away, so yeah, for owners, it’s like, ‘Hey we have this solution for you, for contractors.’ It’s really a matter of, this is a next generation product that everybody, from owners, are wanting. They need it," Aguayo said.
This is all thanks to some classroom work that revealed much bigger possibilities to fight the sun.
The product is already available to contractors in the Southwest.
Aguayo and Arora are currently working on a reverse formula for cold weather places that would do the same thing, but instead of keeping cold air in, it would keep in the heat.
Residential options are on the horizon, but the focus is on commercial roofs for now.