Vantablack seems to be the color of fashion, but, although many do not know it, it is not something new. It is a tone described as “the blackest black” in the world that, in fact, was already equipped with a car in 2019. The BMW X6 was the first car that wore a color that is synonymous with darkness.
Ben Jensen, founder and technical director of Surrey NanoSystems, creators of the shade, stated at the time: “We have turned down numerous applications from various car manufacturers in the past. It took the BMW X6 and its unique and expressive design for us to consider the idea.”
And it is that this tonality has much more technical substance than it might seem a priori.
His name already gives clues to this, although it is something that no one can know if they do not explain it to him. It is formed by the initial letters of ‘Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array’, that is, ‘vertically aligned array of nanotubes’, a matrix made of carbon.
It is made up of carbon nanotubes that are 14 to 50 micrometers in length, with a diameter of 20 nanometers, making them about 5,000 times thinner than a human hair. In this way, in a square centimeter you can find around a billion of these vertically aligned carbon nanotubes.
Leaving the technique aside, the curious thing is the effect that this configuration produces, since it causes any light that falls on it to be almost completely absorbed, so it is not reflected and what it does is turn into heat.
This, obviously, this paint has consequences for the interior of the vehicle, since its temperature increases, but what it produces in the human eye is more curious, since by not creating reflections, it causes all traces of detail to be lost and the image interpreted as if it were in two dimensions, as if the car (in this case) were completely flat.
To delve a little deeper into the origin of Vantablack, its first generation was presented by Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 and it was already capable of absorbing up to 99.965% of the light it received.
