Visit to Okinawa Sept.2014

Okinawa is the southmost part of Japan, and it is the hottest region that experiences severe storms as well. With the advent of concrete, these climatic conditions had led the typical roofing system to change gradually from a tiled roof into concrete flat roofs. Such flat concrete roofs absorb much higher solar radiation compared to the conventional tiled roof. One of the means to modulate the solar gain in such cases is to use solar paints as final finishing or use ventilated tiles that are painted with solar paint. During the lab visit to Okinawa in 2014, we met Prof Tsutsumi, form the local university,  The University of Ryukyus who have started looking at solar paints implementation on the concrete flat roof. We took some thermal photos that show big differences between the typical finishes and solar paint finishes, and there was even some shows remarkable variation between the different solar paint brands.