Advancing insulation retrofits from flexible inexpensive lucid materials (AIR FILMs) for single-pane windows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project focused on Advancing Insulation Retrofits from Flexible Inexpensive Lucid Materials (AIR FILMs) for Single-Pane Windows. The team developed innovative porous materials that can improve the energy efficiency of existing single-pane windows in commercial and residential buildings in two technical product categories: (1) retrofits that can be applied onto existing windowpanes and (2) manufactured windowpanes that can be installed into the existing window sash. For the first time, visibly transparent, thermally super-insulating, mechanically stable, flexible & inexpensive aerogel films have been developed within the project. Unlike conventional aerogels, the transparent cellulose-enabled aerogel films are low-cost nanostructured metamaterials comprising cellulose nanofibers which are about 4 nm in diameter & 2-3 microns in length produced in a cost-effective & scalable way, which can be also derived from commercial nanocellulose through chemical processing. Like the ones used for thermal insulation in the Mars Rover, our aerogels are excellent thermal barriers, but also highly transparent. They transmit over 99% of visible light, have color rendering index over 99% and haze under 1%. They can be manufactured at low costs, under 1 dollar per square foot. The porous material fabrication starts from aqueous dispersions of the cellulose nanofibers that are converted to an ordered hydrogel to produce a flexible aerogel film in the m2-size scale, with low thermal conductivity. These aerogels enabled retrofit products to be laminated atop of existing windowpanes to retrofit single-pane windows. Also, the new installed products with aerogel films sandwiched between two glass panes have been developed to further improve efficiency while reducing the spacing between panes as compared to conventional double-pane windows. These installed products are envisaged both as the replacement for single-pane windows and as a new breed of low-thickness insulating glass units to be used in new building construction. Both applied and installed products, enabled by our transparent aerogel materials, meet aggressive goals of appearance, thermal insulation, transparency, low cost, stability, condensation resistance, soundproofing & other technical targets for retrofits and manufactured panes, respectively. During the initial part of the project, the research team first demonstrated a small-scale applied product meeting all required parameters. The researchers then extended these findings to the demonstration of robust transparent aerogels on the square-meter scales. The team performed extensive durability tests (some of which took advantage of NREL’s state-of-art user facilities), demonstrating that the products pass all standard tests used by the glass industry. Meeting all the technical targets, the researchers compared performance of single-pane windows before and after retrofitting and optimized optical, thermal and other characteristics and fabrication approaches, as well as developed technological solutions of sealing edges and laminating AIR FILMs, as needed for their deployment in both applied and installed products. The aerogel technology has been licensed to a major US glass industry manufacturer with the largest market share. By winning the NASA iTech competition, the researchers attracted a great deal of attention and started many partnerships with glass industry, which are helpful in bringing the AIR FILM aerogel technology to the market and to every window of commercial and residential buildings. The broad commercial adoption of the developed transparent aerogel materials in window products would improve thermal insulation, reduce condensation and enhance the occupant comfort, as well as produce secondary benefits, such as improved soundproofing, making these products more desirable to building occupants and owners. Most importantly, the developed applied and installed products have the potential to cut in half the amount of heat lost through single-pane windows, which was the main goal of the ARPA-E program sponsoring this project. The retrofit films and new breeds of insulating glass units will boost efficiency of windows in both the pre-existing buildings and in the new constriction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".