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More transparent than glass, new material cools rooms and self-cleans
Having lots of glass surfaces can brighten up a room, but it also lets in too much heat as well as neighbors’ prying eyes. A new metamaterial is not only more transparent to light, but adds privacy, cools the room inside, and automatically cleans itself.
Known as a Polymer-based Micro-photonic Multi-functional Metamaterial (PMMM), the team’s creation takes the form of a thin film that can be stuck onto a pane of regular glass. “When the material is used in roofs and walls, it allows for bright yet glare-free and privacy-protected indoor spaces for work and living,” said Gan Huang, lead author of the study. It sounds like sci-fi stuff, but it’s a well-studied phenomenon called radiative cooling that takes advantage of the fact that the Earth’s atmosphere is transparent to infrared wavelengths.
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