As the damage caused by the recent climate crisis increases,
efforts
are being made to develop low-power and high-efficiency technologies
to reduce pollution for energy production worldwide. Among them, research
on the mechano-responsive optical transmittance modulation technology
is being actively conducted as it can be applied to various application
fields for reducing energy consumption: low-power sensors and smart
windows. The piezo-transmittance structure, which is one of the optical
transmittance modulation structures, has fewer constraints on the
installation environment; therefore, many applications have been proposed.
However, it is still challenging to fabricate a piezo-transmittance
structure with a large-area production, high throughput, and good
tunability because of complex curing and dissolution processes. Herein,
we present an efficient fabrication method for a multi-layered piezo-transmittance
structure using a large-area abrasive mold and thermal imprinting
process. The piezo-transmittance performance (e.g., sensitivity and
relative change of transmittance) shows temperature/humidity-independent
characteristics and can be designed by tuning design parameters such
as the number of layers, abrasive grade, and film material. Also,
the surrogate model of the performance obtained from the Monte Carlo
simulation and prediction model can offer tunability for various applications.
Finally, we demonstrated two energy-efficient applications: the smart
window integrated with a hydraulic pump showed high thermal efficiency
in indoor environment control, and the telemetry system was demonstrated
to measure pressure remotely.