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New liquid crystal smart window and its production process (SMART WIN II)

Deliverables

Patterning (i.e. glazing having different optical states in different areas) is one major output from this project and is a completely new way of manipulating the optical and thermal behaviour of windows. It's new because it's just feasible with the new technology of liquid crystals and not achievable with another technology yet. This novelty made it necessary to think about patterning and its influence on fenestration systems due to the lack of any experience with patterning. The main goal of this task was therefore to define a model pattern system, perform simulations with several varying parameters (transmission range, pattern number, pattern size, outer situation) to get some feeling of the performance of such patterned system. As a result of these simulations, decision criteria were found and a final pattern was defined. Also the influence of patterning on the solar heat gain of the window was derived. As a result of these evaluation it turned out that the visual comfort will be enhanced because not the hole surface but only specific areas must be darkened at high outer light illuminance levels. This will provide a minimum natural light level in the room (savings on artificial light) and will sustain a contact to the outside essential for a convenient working space.
WP 2 - Task2-3 - Improvement of new materials. New films using two-frequency addressable liquid crystals were successfully elaborated. They allow to get rid of the disadvantages of the existing films (which take time -a few minutes or even more- to come back to their initial state): - The return of the new films to the perfect planar reflective state only takes a few seconds - There are no defects in the orientation of the liquid crystals molecules. WP 3 – Task3.2 - Patterning: From the optimal patterns defined by Bartenbach from the simulation results together with the conventional daylight systems, we developed a seven-step process to elaborate the patterned films. A very good resolution (a few microns) was obtained. We mainly focused on the increase in size of the demonstrators by adapting the above process. Currently, the devised process can be used for large area glazing and allows making any drawings, letters, digits, etc.

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