Windows play significant roles in commercial and residential buildings and automobiles, which direct and control light illumination, thermal insulation, natural ventilation, and aesthetics. Various approaches are attempted to make windows “smart” by tailoring their transparency and thermal insulation in response to environmental changes. Hence, there has been much effort to develop smart windows that can dynamically modulate the transmission and reflectance of the visible light and solar radiance into buildings according to weather conditions or personal preferences. Development of smart window materials is also beneficial to applications including wearable sensors, energy harvesting and storage, and medical devices. By carefully matching the refractive indices of nanoparticle (NPs) and polymer matrix, surface chemistry, and their mechanical properties, particle‐embedded polymer composites can exhibit synergistic effects with improved chemical and mechanical stability, enhanced dispersion of NPs, and optimized and stimuli‐responsive optical properties. Here, an overview of recent progresses in the development of smart windows based on electro‐, thermo‐, and mechanoactuations is provided. Additional functionalities, e.g., flexibility, stretchability, and mechanical/chemical stability, can also be achieved by careful choices of NPs and polymers.
It will be ideal to deliver equal, optimally efficient "doses" of sunlight to all cells in a photobioreactor system, while simultaneously utilizing the entire solar resource. Backed by the numerical scattering simulation and optimization, here, the design, synthesis, and characterization of the synthetic iridocytes that recapitulated the salient forward-scattering behavior of the Tridacnid clam system are reported, which presents the first geometric solution to allow narrow, precise forward redistribution of flux, utilizing the solar resource at the maximum quantum efficiency possible in living cells. The synthetic iridocytes are composed of silica nanoparticles in microspheres embedded in gelatin, both are low refractive index materials and inexpensive. They show wavelength selectivity, have little loss (the back-scattering intensity is reduced to less than ≈0.01% of the forward-scattered intensity), and narrow forward scattering cone similar to giant clams. Moreover, by comparing experiments and theoretical calculation, it is confirmed that the nonuniformity of the scatter sizes is a "feature not a bug" of the design, allowing for efficient, forward redistribution of solar flux in a micrometer-scaled paradigm. This method is environmentally benign, inexpensive, and scalable to produce optical components that will find uses in efficiency-limited solar conversion technologies, heat sinks, and biofuel production.
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