Vacuum-coated glass – added value to a unique material
Tuesday 24 March, 6pm, Room 7140 Stoddart Building
The importance of glass as a construction material is based on its outstanding properties: it can be produced and processed at rather low cost, is insensitive to environmental attack and is largely scratch resistant. Its most important feature, of course, is its transparency for the entire solar spectrum.
Yet glass needs further improvement: the level of reflection of incoming light is too high for many applications in optics and its high transparency for solar heat causes energy waste in cooling the interior of buildings during hot summers while precious heating energy is lost through architectural glazings in winter. For several decades, the vacuum-coating industry has been working to perfect glass through the continuous development of thin film architectures, from simple low emissivity and solar control coatings in the early 1980s to today’s switchable or smart coatings based on the electrochromic principle, which help to optimise energy transfer through glazings throughout the year.
Places are free and include light refreshments but must be booked in advance.