Multifunctional Window Coatings for High-Performance Buildings

Laboratory Directed Research and Development

Delia Milliron, Jeffrey Urban, Yuegang Zhang and Andre Anders AFRD, Thomas Richardson EETD

The goal of this project is to develop materials necessary to support key technological advances in window coating technology for improved building efficiency. The two motivating technologies are windows which harvest light outside the visible spectrum to produce energy and spectrally selective dynamic coatings for climate responsive NIR transparency. To enable these technologies, we propose to develop NIR- and visible-transparent conductors based alternatively on doped oxides (TCOs) or on carbon nanomaterials and focus on scalable deposition and low sheet resistance. Two approaches to energy harvesting are proposed. The first would employ lanthanide doped nanocrystals in NIR luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) while the other leverages the Seebeck effect to convert heat to electricity. For this, thermovoltage effects in multilayer stacks of materials already used in passive window coatings will be investigated. Finally, the potential for NIR electrochromics based on TCO nanocrystals will be evaluated by studying their electrochemical and electro-optical properties, and the transport characteristics of nanocrystal thin films.