Rice University researchers and collaborators have developed a new coating for glass could help reduce energy bills, especially during the cold season, by preventing heat-loss from leaky windows. Credit: Jorge Vidal / Rice University
Rice University researchers have developed a new glass coating which could help reduce energy consumption by preventing heat-loss through leaky windows. Thanks to its durability, the coating could be applied to the exterior of glass, creating a significant advantage over similar conventionally used coatings.
The coating, outlined in a recent publication in Advanced Materials, is made by weaving carbon in to a boron nitride atomic lattice. During their testing the team simulated the coatings performance in cold winter climates such as New York, Beijing, and Calgary, noting an energy savings of nearly 3% compared to existing installations.
"Although pure boron nitride shows almost similar emissivity to glass, when you add a small amount of carbon to it, the emissivity lowers significantly—and this changes the game altogether," said Pulickel Ajayan, Professor of Engineering, materials science and nanoengineering at Rice.
To create the coating the team uses pulsed laser deposition which uses high energy laser bursts to spark plumes of plasma which can disperse into vapor before settling onto a target substrate. Their technique strikes a boron nitride target which can then settle onto glass, but the team points out that the technique could be adapted for other materials such as polymers, or textiles.
"This broadens the application space for boron nitride coatings significantly," added Ajayan.
To evaluate the coating, the team partnered with researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong who focus on functional materials particularly smart window technologies. Yi Long, a co-corresponding author from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, emphasizes the durability of the coating as a key differentiator when comparing it to traditional technologies.
"The high weatherability makes it the first outdoor-facing low-E window coating, with an energy-saving capacity that clearly outperforms the indoor-facing counterpart," Long said. "It could be an excellent solution in densely built environments."