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Smart Glass Blocks Infrared - But Only When It's Hot
klevin writes "New Scientist has an article about a new way of making sheets of glass so they block infrared energy at temperatures above 29C (84.2F). Just so long as it doesn't have to get that hot on both sides of the glass. My AC comes on way before 84F. I suppose that with double or triple paned glass, you'd only treat the exterior pane."
How's that yellow tint going to look where indoor light is already greenish from fluorescent lighting? Will we walk outside and everything will look pink or purple? Fun!
Hopefully in three years they'll give some answers to these questions and more. I've got a couple windows, but we've got no air conditioning and the heat reflects off an earthen bank, most of the heat comes through the walls.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If this technology comes out, a good application is to use it in cars (especially in hot areas).
The yellow tint issue would have to be definitively solved before this stuff could be used on vehicles, due to some states not allowing certain colors of window tinting (red and yellow, probably reasoning that that would lower the visibility of emergency vehicles and caution lights).
How about some electronics grounding that vanadium dioxide? If set up right, when the VO2 transitions to "metallic" above 29C, the panel's photoelectric effect could harness the solar power now more highly available. That in turn could power other devices, like awnings, vent covers, or even fans, to mitigate the heat, using the sun's power against itself.
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make install -not war
This is wonderful, and a step in the right direction to be sure. I was actually just pondering if this kind of thing was possible the other day. Unfortunatly, buildings are still made like huge heat syncs. This is because a flat surface has a very poor surface area to volume ratio, other sky scraper shapes, such as cylinders, are even worse. R. Buckminster Fuller explains this in his Critical Path. What really elucidates this is he says if we theoretically covered all the buildings from 20th to 80th St, I think it was, in Manhatten with one large dome we would decrease the surface area exposed to the elements by a factor of 84. Consequently, it would take 1/84th of the energy to heat and cool the environment.
~Anztac
I've worked in the glass industry for over three years, acutally for one of the direct competitors of the people (Pilkington) who came up with this. Coating glass almost always (90% of the time) requires an insulated (two lites of glass) unit. The coating goes on the inner surface because it is easy to scratch the coating off, and since its a near vaccum inside insulated units they don't have to worry about what ambient conditions will do to the coating. Now the yellow tint will be a non-issue come production time. It realy will be either applying it to glass that is already tinted to cancel out the yellow or they'll modify the formula to get it to appear clear. And the fact that it eventually wears out will either be adjusted for in the R&D process (not likely, too expensive), or offering some kind of warranty on it. It is cheaper to re-produce because of the scale of glass plants, than it would be for the R&D to get another year or two of useful life. The process of coating itself is very very interesting. They pretty much ionize particles to bond at a molecular level to the glass. It's a niche field, but one that is very lucrative because there are not that many people in it. And as far as costs are concerned, it should be rather cheap. Glass itself costs around 1-5 cents (US) per squarefoot. A float glass plant produces around 650 tons of glass a day. The process is really really efficient.
In Tokyo, law requires large buildings to have roof gardens to prevent the roofs from getting so hot. Plants will use that energy to grow, instead of letting that energy hit concrete, metal, etc and become heat. Its estimated that tokyo would be 10 degrees hotter on average without the roof gardens.