New financing for solar windows – technology that could boost national energy resilience
Solariton, the ‘solar windows’ project run by the research group of Alexandre Dmitriev, gets a boost and enters a new phase with funding from Vinnova.
Vinnova’s Emerging Technology Solutions programme aims to finance ‘innovation projects that strengthen the conditions for Swedish deeptech’ and to ‘pave the way for the next generation of transformative system solutions.’
Describing the Solariton project and its potential results, Alexandre Dmitriev says: “This next iteration in our research on thermal management with transparent surfaces - like architectural windows and automotive windshields - will produce a prototype of a surface that is fully visibly transparent. It will reflect or adsorb near-infrared and infrared solar light on demand. That is to say, it will be switchable between the two operation modes. Additionally, it will be fully transparent for mobile phone signals. The latter is typically an issue with current state of the art so-called low-emission thermally reflective windows. We circumnavigate this by using the concept of a ‘metasurface’ – artificial matter that interacts with light in a way natural materials can’t. We call this new prototype a ‘solar metaglass’.”
Vinnova will be involved in the development of Solariton through coaching and workshops, and in helping to prepare the projects for a possible next stage of financing. The commercial launch of a finished product is expected around 2028.
Read more about Solariton here
Researchers in the project
Dr. Ihar Fanyieu, Dr. Rafael Cichelero, Prof. Alexandre Dmitriev.
Original papers from the group on the technology
S. Hanauer et al., Photothermal conversion of solar infrared radiation by plasmonic nanoantennas for photovoltaic-thermoelectric hybrid devices, ACS Applied Energy Materials 6, 2128 (2023)
G. Edman Jönsson, D. Tordera, T. Pakizeh, M. Jaysankar, V. Miljkovic, L. Tong, M. P. Jonsson and A. Dmitriev, Solar transparent radiators by optical nanoantennas, Nano Letters 17, 6766 (2017)
G. Edman Jonsson, V. Miljkovic, A. Dmitriev, Nanoplasmon-enabled macroscopic thermal management, Scientific Reports 4:5111, doi: 10.1038/srep05111 (2014)
