Rechercher
Smart glazing : efficient and durable thermal insulation
40% of total energy consumption ! This is the portion attributed to public and private buildings in Europe. Reducing this consumption is the task that scientists are focusing on, notably with research on new materials. One specific issue is the development of low emissivity glazing, which insulates heated interior spaces from the outside cold in winter. To design such glazing, the most effective solution consists in depositing layers of silver, each around ten nanometres thick – i.e. a few tens of atomic layers – at the heart of multilayer stacks. In practice, the deposit is laid on the inside surface of double glazing.
Almost perfect mirrors in the infrared, while maintaining an excellent transparency in the visible region, the layers of silver are sophisticated optical filters. But with a constraint : the silver film must be continuous and of uniform thickness, even after the thermal treatments at ≈550°C applied during the tempering of the glazing, while in the stacks, silver finds itself in contact with oxides it cannot wet adequately. To overcome this problem, one of the appropriate methods involves the deposit of intermediate layers of transition metals, such as titanium, between the silver and the oxide. The team "Oxides in low dimensions" of the Paris Nanosciences Institute is working on the relationships between the wetting of the silver layers and the physico-chemistry of interfaces, so as to make these layers an efficient and durable thermal insulation.
Institut des nanosciences de Paris, CNRS-Université Paris 6
Facebook
Twitter