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Financial source: Junta de Andalucía Code: P18-RT-2641 Acronym: TOLERANCE |
Principal Investigator: Ángel Barranco Quero y Alberto Palmero Acebedo Period: Research team: Ana María Gómez Ramírez, Juan Ramón Sánchez Valencia, Víctor J. Rico Gavira, Rafael Álvarez Molina, Francisco Yubero Valencia, Juan Pedro Espinós Manzorro, Ana Isabel Borrás Martos, Agustín R. González-Elipe |
The International Energy Agency considers that the systematic use of autonomous procedures for environmental control is one of the best technological approaches to minimize the energy employed to cool down buildings and other urban structures (it represents more than 40% of the global energy use in developed countries, much above the use in transportation, for instance), thus reducing the environmental impact and improving human comfort. TOLERANCE aims at introducing and developing a technology based on thermochromic materials in Andalusia as a smart and autonomous element to control the penetration of solar radiation in buildings. This project focusses on various applications such as smart windows in buildings and urban furniture, improvement of sanitary water systems or environmental control in greenhouses. While at low temperatures, a thermochromic coating transmits most solar spectrum, it selectively filters out the infrared region of this spectrum at high temperatures. In this research, TOLERANCE proposes several R+D actions to grow thin films with composition VO2, a thermochromic oxide with transition temperature near room temperature, on glass and plastic by means of industrial scalable techniques, as well as its nanostructuration, doping and integration in multilayer systems to improve its features and multifunctional properties.