Brightlands Materials Center is currently developing a self-adaptive smart window, which can change its solar heat gain depending on the glazing temperature. Therefore it enables using solar heat for heating a building in cold conditions and shutting out solar heat in warm conditions to increase comfort and reduce cooling demand.
To demonstrate the benefit of the new technology and quantify the impact on energy savings and CO2 emission reduction, we performed building energy simulations on a typical residential building.
- We compared annual energy consumption for heating, cooling and lighting for a free standing, three story building equipped with standard double glazing to the same house equipped with various energy efficient glazing systems.
- We analyzed the benefit of commercially available systems, such as low-e glazing and tinted glass, and compared them to our new smart window in various climate regions.
The results
The simulation results showed that whereas commercially available static energy efficient glazing solutions are optimized for either hot or cold climates, our new adaptive glazing is perfectly optimized for all intermediate climate regions. As a prototypical example, we showed that in the Netherlands the energy consumption for a single household could be reduced by 22% if our smart window was used instead of a standard clear glass. Here, as for all intermediate climates, the adaptive glazing outperforms all other comparable energy efficient glazing systems and would lead to annual cost savings of 638 €.
Furthermore we could show, that by employing the thermochromic smart window nationwide, CO2 emissions for the whole Dutch built environment could be reduced by 4.5 Mt, which surpasses the goals set by the Dutch government for 2025 by 32%.
Interested? Please contact Eugène Veerkamp.