Vantablack opens up hundreds of new applications. Here, an technician holds material coated with Vantablack S-VIS. Surrey NanoSystems has granted exclusive rights to the use of the ultra-black Vantablack S-VIS surface coating to Santa Barbara Infrared (SBIR) of Santa Barbara, CA, for military, aerospace IR/FLIR testing, and simulation markets. "The broadband absorption of Vantablack coatings, and the highly uniform deposition layer, helps us to create blackbody sources offering extremely high radiometric performance without caveats, which greatly enhancing ease of use," said SBIR President, Steve McHugh. Initially, SBIR is using Surrey NanoSystems' U.K. facility to apply the Vantablack coating, while establishing a Santa Barbara coating facility this year to serve the North American defense, aerospace, and electro-optical markets. “We’ll provide coating as a service in the U.S. just as Surrey does in Great Britain. The main advantage of us coating here is that a lot of the components will be ITAR restricted.
Shipping from Florida to Santa Barbara is a little easier than shipping from Florida to Surrey, England,” said McHugh. Surrey NanoSystems' Vantablack is said to be the world's blackest surface coating material for the UV to far infrared (FIR) spectrum. It employs an innovative nanomaterial structure that absorbs virtually all incident light. Vantablack was developed for space-borne imaging applications and offers what is described as "exceptional IR absorption and excellent thermal, mechanical, and environmental stability." The material was recently applied to equipment deployed on an Earth observation satellite. “It has applications in blackbodies in addition to cold shields and optical baffling and any other place where you’d want to capture light or emit light or IR light,” said McHugh. “There are other areas that it could be applicable in the automotive fields, in automation and machine vision, in drones, or in agriculture,” said McHugh. “The drone industry is going to grow into the hyperspectral imaging sector in precision agriculture to help out in maximizing resources more efficiently while increasing yield.
The use of cameras plays a huge part of that. The cold shields that go into those IR cameras are part of that, as are the blackbodies required to calibrate them,” added Tony Vengel, Director of Business Development at SBIR. “We even have a customer that will be able to determine what types of trash are going across a conveyor belt using an IR camera,” said Vengel. The S-VIS version of Vantablack traps over 99.8% of near- and mid-IR wavelengths hitting its surface with near-perfect Lambertian performance. This absorption is maintained over a wide range of wavelengths and viewing angles, far outstripping conventional black paints and other vacuum-deposited coatings. These characteristics are critical for SBIR’s specialized equipment, where compliance with rigorous U.S. defense standards, long-term stability, and traceable precision are essential attributes. The active element of Vantablack S-VIS is a functionalized carbon nanotube matrix. The coating process includes pre-processing, a spray-on process, and post-application steps.
The process is scalable and suitable for high-volume production on both small and large substrates, and on complex 3D surfaces. Vantablack S-VIS can be applied to a variety of substrates, with the only major constraint being the ability of the substrate to withstand process temperatures of 100-150°C, making the coating suitable for application onto many popular types of engineering-grade polymers and composite materials. Since its launch in spring 2016, well over 100 Vantablack S-VIS projects have already been completed, including in space-borne instrumentation and military optical systems. The agreement with SBIR provides the next platform for the further adoption of the technology. Read More Articles On Electrical, Electronics, and Avionics Technical Papers / Journal ArticlesThe streets are lined with gum trees, dogs bark in generous backyards and the op shops still sell clothes for a dollar. This could be any Australian suburb, but there's something unusual going on in Boronia, about 30 kilometres east of Melbourne's CBD.
Neighbours peer curiously over their fences at a house that is painted completely black. As far as urban development goes, they haven't seen anything quite like this.Taking inspiration from the black monoliths of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the house on Boronia Road is intended to be from the future, shedding light on what our suburbs may look like in decades to come."This is my black, suburban monolith," says Clare McCracken. She and a team of other artists have transformed the house inside and out for the annual Immerse public art festival, supported by Knox City Council.Taking its name, Section 32, from the official vendor statement made to a property buyer, the immersive work aims to provoke discussion about urban development, technology and the effects of climate change on our cities into the future."I had a lot of conversations with planning academics about where Melbourne was at, and we're floundering a little bit at the moment," McCracken says. "We had Melbourne 2030 but there's not been any really great vision for the way that we're developing and sprawling."
At the door of the mysterious house, visitors – allowed in groups of only 10 at a time – are greeted by a "futurist anthropologist". Inside, the house itself does the talking.An eerie soundtrack by Robert D Jordan floats through the corridors. Water drips from the ceiling and laps at the floorboards as a weeks-long storm thrashes outside. "Carbon counters" that track every individual's carbon footprint spin like warning sirens.In a room with a distinct orange glow, a long-distance lover calls in from Mars. In the bathroom, a family of yabbies can be heard scraping their claws against the bathtub, next to a vibrant indoor garden."I feel like yabbies would survive everything," McCracken explains. "When the bushfires went through mum's property in Myrtleford, they were the one survivor that came out of the dam."There's a distinct sense of unease about the house but it's not spooky, says Brienna Macnish, another collaborator.The site has been donated to the festival by a philanthropist before its scheduled destruction.
But not all the neighbours were initially happy about using it for an art project. McCracken puts that down to anxiety over the future of our suburbs – the very themes the work explores. This is my black, suburban monolith. "Boronia is going from the quarter-acre block to medium density, and people that have lived here their whole lives are like, 'What is happening?'," she says.Jo Herbig, community and public arts officer at Knox City council, describes the broader Immerse program – comprising 40 artists across 30 venues for 30 days – as an "arts intervention"."It's about bringing art to the people as opposed to people having to go to it," she says. "In the suburbs it's not such a popular pursuit to go to a gallery.""You want to change Australian ideas – come to the suburbs," McCracken says.Section 32 is on Mondays and Saturdays, 10am to 4pm, from November 12 to December 10 at 231 Boronia Road, Boronia. Immerse runs from November 12 to December 12 at various venues.