Innovation
Nano Sensors and Actuators for Smart Personal Environment, Energy Saving, Health, and Safety Application
European Grand Prix Award for Innovation
Micro Mirror Array
- In "micro" size - not visible to bare eye. No obstruction of view through the glass.
- Electrostatically actuatable to position the micro mirror arrays in open or close position, or in certain position in between.
- Functions based on reflection and light guiding/steering instead of absorption, therefore zero or very minimal internal heating
- micro structures are fabricated with MEMS technology - enable very high durability and long lifetime due to miniaturization
- Fast response time
- Various application possibilities
Smart Micro Mirror Glazing
Concept
Millions of micro mirrors integrated into multifunctional smart micro mirror glazings provide active daylight guiding into buildings and active climatization support to enable innovative energy management. The patented concept provides high security, long mechanical lifetimes and low power consumption in buildings.
The microscopic mirrors are invisible to the bare eye - the view through the window pane gives an impression of a variable toned pane. The transmission can be controlled continuously between totally open and totally closed state. The amount, direction and degree of scattering of the guided light is tailored to winter, summer and variable daytime requirements. Thus, sun protection of rooms and persons inside is obtained at the same time with natural daylight illumination. The concept considers daytime- and seasons-variable sun positions and is based on reflection contrary to existing concepts based on absorption in the panes.
Customer, User and Society Benefits
- Protection of environment and huge energy saving without limitations in lifestyle and comfort.
- Sustainable energy saving up to 35% and CO2 saving up to 30%
- Benefit in summer and in winter (competing products reveal benefit only in summer or winter)
- Personalized light steering considering daytime, season, sun position or brightest spots on the sky and user behavior inside the room. Easy to integrate in smart building concepts
- Improving indoor climate with positive effects on human health, well-being and productivity. Increase of work satisfaction and human productivity. This also results in less sickness absences.
- Regarding Life Science and Health: additional applications for taking care of elderly persons in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
- Improved security: the metal layers enable alarm functions against burglaries without extra cost
- Acceleration in installation of smart green city concepts
Proven Feasibility via Function Demonstrators
Feasibility of customer benefit was already validated in 5 key points: (i) our smart glazing demonstrator was fabricated under industrial conditions and (ii) already demonstrates light steering functions, (iii) various rapid aging tests show no wear and tear, (iv) energy saving verified in the experiment, and (v) energy consumption of our glazing is more than 100x lower than for other competing systems
The lab demonstrator consists of 4 modules of micro mirror arrays, which can be controlled independently to obtain specific ambience lighting of the room.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
From our continuous monitoring and comparison with other alternative active or passive shading systems in the market, we have established our competitive edge beyond what the current solution can provide - whether in power consumption, functionalities, response time, safety feature, as well as application area. Our main USP are:
- Energy efficiency booster for buildings
- Smart personalized light steering
- Simultaneous room temperature and lighting control
- Shading solution for buildings with more than 7th floor due to wind conditions
- Safety feature: windows are transparent in case of power failure
- Customer benefit in summer and winter
Further Innovations and R&D
Our portfolio of potential application area is not limited to these 2 areas only.
Our strength lies in our extensive and comprehensive effort - we always put the whole picture into consideration: not just product technicalities, but also the commercial arrangement, manufacturing and fabrication, distribution, as well as the integrability with existing systems. We make sure to identify the critical areas and determine cost-effective solutions to our system.
In this regard, it is important to note that:-
- Smart micro mirror glazings have been implemented in window modules in industrial fabrication environment. Long-term life-time tests and rapid aging tests were successful.
- Scaling-up is our current step and comprises different aspects: (i) system manufacturing in real production conditions, (ii) scaling the area of the smart micro mirror glazing, (iii) scaling the production volume, (iv) scaling the product reliability, (v) scaling the customer benefits and (vi) scaling business.