Windows welcome light into interior spaces, but they also bring in unwanted heat. A new window coating blocks heat-generating ultraviolet and infrared light and lets through visible light, regardless of the sun’s angle. The coating can be incorporated onto existing windows or automobiles and can reduce air-conditioning cooling costs by more than one-third in hot climates.
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Window coatings used in many recent studies are optimized for light that enters a room at a 90-degree angle. Yet at noon, often the hottest time of the day, the sun’s rays enter vertically installed windows at oblique angles.
Luo and his postdoctoral associate Seongmin Kim previously fabricated a transparent window coating by stacking ultra-thin layers of silica, alumina and titanium oxide on a glass base. A micrometer-thick silicon polymer was added to enhance the structure’s cooling power by reflecting thermal radiation through the atmospheric window and into outer space.
Additional optimization of the order of the layers was necessary to ensure the coating would accommodate multiple angles of solar light.
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Their model produced a coating that both maintained transparency and reduced temperature by 5.4 to 7.2 degrees Celsius in a model room, even when light was transmitted in a broad range of angles. The lab’s results were recently published in Cell Reports Physical Science.
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Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Notre Dame. Original written by Karla Cruise. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- Seongmin Kim, Serang Jung, Alexandria Bobbitt, Eungkyu Lee, Tengfei Luo. Wide-angle spectral filter for energy-saving windows designed by quantum annealing-enhanced active learning. Cell Reports Physical Science, 2024; 5 (3): 101847 DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2024.101847
Source: Sunrise to sunset, new window coating blocks heat — not view | ScienceDaily
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