Material could help windows both power your home and control its temperature

Environmentally friendly building trends have boosted the popularity of window coatings that keep heating and cooling costs down by blocking out unneeded parts of sunlight. They have also inspired scientists and engineers to create thin, see-through solar cells to turn windows into miniature electricity generators.

Researchers in China have gone a step further and combined these two functions into one window-compatible material that could double the energy efficiency of an average household. Their work appears in the journal Joule.

Mixing and matching from among materials and chemical compounds previously proposed for these different purposes, they put together a device that let the familiar visible portions of sunlight through, turned back the infrared light (a major heating culprit), and converted the near-infrared region in-between into an electric current.

Read more at Tech Xplore

Image Credit: Cell Press

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