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Louvolite explains how fabric technology allows you to choose your favourite colour while maintaining solar reflectance
 Park your car for any length of time on a sunny day and it is surprising how hot the interior becomes. This is particularly true if the car is a dark coloured car. We probably all recognise that this is due to heat absorption and also that lighter coloured cars suffer less due to their higher heat reflection.
Historically, this is why traditional cricket and tennis apparel is white – they are deemed summer sports in the UK and the white fabric helps keep players cool when exposed to the sun for long periods. Obviously, sporting apparel has changed with bolder colours being used and even black cricketwear adorning cricketers at the recent events in Australia – and that at a time of year when temperatures can reach 40 degrees!
 Surely the sportsmen and women will overheat?
Well, that’s where the boffins associated with textile development come into their own. New technologically advanced textiles can perform tasks that simple cotton and polyesters fail to do – fabrics can now let your skin ‘breathe’ or ‘wick away’ perspiration, keeping the wearer dry and cool/warm depending on the circumstances – amazing!
Louvolite referred to advances in technical textiles when it was creating CCT (cold coat technology), which it has now engineered into its Carnival, Guardian and Tribune fabrics.
So what is CCT? Why would you want it and where could you use it?
CCT is a specialised coating formula that allows darker coloured fabrics to feature a much higher solar reflectance figure than an alternative fabric of similar colour without CCT. For example, a traditional black fabric blind will offer no reflection qualities at all and absorb all the heat energy that does not filter through the fabric. This heat energy, once absorbed, will turn into radiated heat that will then be transmitted into the inside of the room, increasing room temperature.
CCT Carnival Black will actually reflect 26 per cent of solar gain, resulting in a significant and meaningful reduction of heat energy being absorbed and therefore passed into the room via radiation.
Obviously, this is not just about black but all darker shades and many mid tones feature improved solar gain reflection performance and therefore show reduction in heat gain over and above traditional alternative fabrics that do not feature CCT.
If a client wished to shade a number of windows within a commercial office environment which features artificial cooling by means of air conditioning, it would be sensible to reduce heat gain to a minimum in order to reduce the requirement of the air conditioning system to cool warmed air seen through solar gain. This would reduce the working requirement of the air conditioning and therefore the running costs and CO2 emissions.
If no air conditioning is present, the ability to reflect the maximum amount of solar gain that enters via windows is just as important as it is recognised that employee comfort levels are key to helping them achieve their working efficiency.
 Many darker colours are selected for use in colleges and schools – blackout fabrics can sometimes create too dark an environment whereas darker fabrics provide sufficient light reduction without total opacity. In part, this is due to the lower transmission of light, which can be perceived as a negative when whiteboards are used – these are now absolutely typical in all modern schools, colleges and other places of learning.
Other instances where darker shades are selected may be as a result of corporate colour schemes being applied to interior designs or coordinating window furnishings with other decorative surfaces or textiles – it may just be that the client just loves the particular colour. Whether the reason is based on logic or emotion, you can now rest assured that there is a product that can provide extra performance benefits to fabulous colour and texture choices: Louvolite CCT – demand improved performance.
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