News

CERC research team part of 3-university collaboration

Researchers from USF’s Clean Energy Research Center are part of a collaboration involving three universities and two countries joining to study how to improve window materials that can increase building energy efficiency.

Fifteen researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia, the University of South Florida, and Florida Polytechnic University have been collaborating on how to make Thermochromic (TC) coatings and electrochromic (EC) windows more cost effective yet still able to withstand photo degradation since they are continuously exposed to sunlight.

Polymer-based TC materials and EC windows suffer greatly under UV irradiation. These TC materials and EC active layers can also degrade when exposed to other narrow frequency bands (visible, infrared) in the solar spectrum. The main purpose of this inter-university collaborative effort is to identify these frequency bands, by carrying out experimental research and theoretical modeling, and come up with ways to prevent such degradation.

The USF Clean Energy Research Center (CERC) has also accepted an invitation to join another international collaborative project, “Nanontechnology-based thermochromic materials for adaptive building envelopes,” led by Professor M. Santamouris of the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Research institutions collaborating in that project include the Spanish National Research Council-CSIC, National University of Singapore-NUS, Politechnico Di Torino (Italy), California State Polytechnic University Pomona, and Graz University of Technology (Austria).

CERC Co-Director Dr. Elias Stefanakos and CERC Publications Editor Carol Blair contributed to this report.