Glass News

Another inch of snow possible; wind-chill -14: Today, about another inch of snow is expected along with a wind-chill factor as low as 14 degrees below zero, according to the National Weather Service's Grand Rapid station. The wind-chill represents how cold it feels outside. By day's end, the area could have a total of just under 5 inches of snow on the ground, primarily from Thursday's storm, the weather service reported. Despite the snow and single-digit temperatures James Whitaker, with Great Lakes Window Cleaning, cleans the windows at Farnum Building in downtown Lansing Friday, January 9, 2015. Whitaker said they use ethanol alcohol to keep the cleaning solution from freezing. He joked that he'll take cleaning windows in the heat of summer anyday and that he thinks about quitting every winter.

Pella (yep, the window company) enters the connected-home market (LAS VEGAS): You know the connected-home market is going mainstream when a company like Pella jumps in with both feet. The noted window- and door-manufacturer announced a whole lineup of wireless products at CES, including doors, windows, garage doors, and motorized shades with Z-Wave sensors built right into the products. This neatly solves one of the biggest aesthetic problems with the smart home: The ugly plastic boxes that bulge off the surface of your door and window frames like angry boils.

Now few of us have the budget to replace all our doors and windows just to get hidden sensors, so Pella will also offer add-on sensors that can be used with any brand of door or window. This enables a homeowner to upgrade their doors and windows one or a few at a time, but still get all the benefits of Pella’s system.

A Pella spokesperson told me an installer can also retrofit any Pella door or window manufactured since 2005 with the embedded sensors.The products will be marketed under the brand name Insynctive. In addition to the usual sensors that report if a door, window, or garage door is open or closed (a tilt sensor, in the case of a garage door), Pella also developed a deadbolt sensor that can inform you if the door is locked or unlocked. This information is relayed to a status indicator that can be stored in a wall holster or held in your hand.

Beyond sensors, Pella also introduced a new line of motorized interior window shades, and windows and French doors with motorized blinds between two panes of glass. The motors run on rechargeable batteries that are connected to miniature external solar panels. Here again, existing Pella doors and windows with built-in blinds can be retrofitted if they were manufactured in 2005 or later. Pella’s Insynctive products are controlled by a handheld remote, or they can be tied into other lighting and connected-home systems using a Z-Wave to ethernet hub. To that end, Pella announced partnerships with Wink and Nexia at the DIY level, and Crestron and Savant at the custom-installer level.

Solar chip monitors windows: A new kind of radio chip is intended to warn when windows are left open. This way, you can avoid having the heat go out the window on cold days. The sensor also detects break-in attempts early on. The key: This maintenance-free chip powers up with energy supplied by solar power.  

It happens all too often in the cold times of the year: You open the window in the morning for fresh air and forget to shut it again. A thermostat reports cold temperatures, and the heating is turned up full blast – right out the window. But open windows are a problem with more than just the heating or storms. A window tilted open, for example, is a direct invitation to intruders. It would be desirable to have an automated system that notices open windows and sends an alarm signal to the tenant. There are certainly home and building systems today that register the window status. As a rule, however, the sensors have to be attached by cable to the alarm center inside the home or building itself. In other cases, battery-operated radio sensors are used. But changing batteries in structures that have several windows can lead to a considerable maintenance expense. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS in Duisburg therefore developed a pragmatic alternative: a radio sensor chip about the size of a fingernail that is mounted directly in the window. The tiny sensor is coated with a solar cell and it supplies itself with power.

Sensors differentiate between ball and crowbar - At ten millimeters, the chip is as narrow as a pane of insulating glass is thick. It is installed on the aluminum profile between the glass that maintains the distance between the panes. Thanks to this window space, the solar cell obtains adequate light, even in the darkness of winter. Integrated in the chip are magnet and acceleration sensors that register if the window is open just a crack or all the way. The chip can send a signal via radio to the base station in the building if a window has remained open for too long. The applications of the radio chip are diverse. It can remind homeowners to ventilate regularly or warn if a window is still open when they leave the home. In addition, it offers reliable protection from intruders even for closed windows. Because the sensors can differentiate very precisely between various fluctuations - for example, a ball that slams against the pane, or an intruder’s crowbar that ratchets open the window frame. Within a tenth of a second, the system detects the disturbance and sounds the alarm if there is any doubt.

Chemical-Sensing Displays and Other Surprising Uses of Glass - An inside look at Corning’s labs suggests what’s next for the inventor of Gorilla Glass: Someday your smartphone might be able to help you in a new way when you’re traveling: by telling you whether the water is safe to drink. Although a water app isn’t close yet, researchers at Corning and elsewhere recently discovered that they could use Gorilla Glass, the toughened glass made by Corning that’s commonly used on smartphone screens, to make extremely sensitive chemical and biological sensors. It could detect, say, traces of sarin gas in the air or specific pathogens in water.

The sensors are just one project I learned about during a visit to Corning’s R&D labs in upstate New York. In the last few decades, Corning’s advances in glass-making have led to technologies such as fiber optics and flat-panel displays. Now, thanks to Gorilla Glass, it’s associated with the latest smartphones. But despite the remarkable success of that product, it is keen to catch the next high-tech boom. Corning spends about 8 percent of its sales on R&D—which will amount to about $800 million this year. It’s a hedge against the very real possibility that one of its businesses could go dark—as has happened in the past. Between 2000 and 2002, Corning lost more than half of its revenue when its fiber-optics business collapsed with much of the rest of the telecom market. Its stock plummeted from $113 to just over $1. This year, it got another scare when one of its largest customers, Apple, came close to replacing Gorilla Glass in iPhones with sapphire.

Displays, in one way or another, account for about half of Corning’s revenue, with roughly a third of that coming from Gorilla Glass. To expand this market and withstand challenges from other materials, Corning is trying to add capabilities to Gorilla Glass, such as the sensor application. And it’s looking for new markets for Gorilla Glass beyond displays.

The ability to turn your phone into a biological and chemical sensor is one of the earliest-stage projects in the lab. Researchers at Corning and Polytechnique Montreal discovered that they could make very high quality waveguides, which confine and direct light, in Gorilla Glass. The researchers were able to make these waveguides very near to the surface, which is essential for sensors. Doing so in ordinary glass would break it. Making the waveguide involves focusing a beam of intense laser light near the surface of the glass, then tracing it along the glass, which locally changes its optical properties.

To make a sensor, the researchers make a waveguide that splits into two identical pathways for light. Then the paths converge, and the light from both paths meet up. One path serves as the sensing path, and the other as a reference. Even a tiny change to the light in the sensing path—such as its intensity—can be detected by observing how the light from the two paths interacts when they meet, producing distinct patterns.

The researchers demonstrated a simple sensor that detects changes in temperature. Heating up the sensing path changes its shape, which changes the properties of the light passing through it. Because the waveguide is so close to the surface, part of the light actually extends out of the glass, and anything placed on the surface of the glass will interact with part of the light. This means that to make a chemical or biological sensor, you could prepare the surface of the glass so that a specific target will bind to it. For example, you might treat it with antibodies that latch onto E. coli. or other contaminants; detecting their presence would be as simple as putting a drop of water on the phone.

The waveguides are microscopically thin, and therefore invisible, so they wouldn’t obscure a display. And because they’re quite small, sensors for several different biological or chemical targets could be incorporated into a smartphone.

Corning researchers have also discovered that Gorilla Glass has useful acoustic properties. The way it vibrates is different than conventional glass—it damps sound waves. The simplest application is noise insulation—it blocks sound better than ordinary glass.

But the same acoustic properties could also turn displays into speakers. I saw such a prototype in one of Corning’s labs. A wire in the display attaches to a small actuator that vibrates the glass to produce sound waves. Because of the way the waves propagate through the glass, they can be more precisely controlled than with ordinary glass, allowing for higher quality sound reproduction.

In another lab, researchers showed off a seemingly ordinary window. Then, with a flip of a switch on a circuit board, it turned into a display—one showing an old Coke commercial—and I could only barely make out what was behind the image. When the ad was over, I could see through the display again. Corning was particularly secretive about how it managed to make this technology work.

Here are (clockwise from bottom) NTU professor Sun Xiaowei, research fellow Liu He, and Ph.D. student Zheng Ke with their self-tinting window.

Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) scientists have developed a smart window which can darken or brighten without the need for an external power source. This unique self-tinting window requires zero electricity to operate and is also a rechargeable battery. The window's stored energy can be used for other purposes, such as to light up low-powered electronics like a light emitting diode (LED).

Currently, the window solutions in the market are either using permanent tinting which cannot brighten at night or are windows that can change its light transmission properties only with an external power source. The NTU smart window however can be turned into a cool blue tint in bright daylight, cutting light penetration by about half, and then reverts back to clear glass at night or as required. This breakthrough research led by NTU Professor Sun Xiaowei, was published recently in Nature Communications, a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal.

How it works - The trick to making the self-powered smart window is a new technology developed by Prof Sun's team from NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. "Our new smart electrochromic window is bi-functional; it is also a transparent battery," Prof Sun explained. "It charges up and turns blue when there is oxygen present in the electrolyte - in other words, it breathes."

The NTU smart window contains liquid electrolyte placed in between two glass sheets coated with indium tin oxide (ITO), commonly used as transparent conductive coatings for television displays. One sheet is coated with an additional layer of a pigment known as Prussian Blue and the other one is attached to a thin strip of aluminium foil. The Prussian Blue gives the glass a blue tint when it is fully charged.

The two glass sheets are connected by typical electrical cables. When the electrical circuit between them is broken, a chemical reaction starts between Prussian Blue and the dissolved oxygen in the electrolyte, turning the glass blue. To turn off the blue tint, the electrical circuit is closed to discharge the battery, turning the Prussian Blue into a colourless Prussian White.

Such an innovative technology can adjust the amount of sunlight coming into buildings in the day, which promises significant savings on cooling and lighting costs. "Our technology is very attractive as a zero-sum consumption smart window. Buildings owners and even common households can reap energy savings right from the outset and over the long term. Developers who are looking at constructing environmentally-friendly green buildings will find our technology attractive for their building plans," said Prof Sun.

Prof Sun is an electrical engineering expert whose other innovations include various solar technologies, glass-free 3D technologies, next-generation lightings and displays. The NTU team is now enhancing their invention and is looking forward to collaborating with industry partners to commercialise their technology.

Smart window startup View is raising another $75M: A year after raising a $100 million financing round, smart window startup View (formerly called Soladigm) is raising another $75 million round, and has closed on about $29 million of the round, according to a filing with the SEC. View makes dynamic windows, also called “electrochromic windows,” which use low-voltage electrical current to reflect or absorb light, tinting or untinting the window on demand.

If it closes the round, View will have raised more than $375 million over its eight year lifetime from investors including private equity firm Madrone Capital Partners (associated with the Walton family, the heirs to the Walmart fortune), Khosla Ventures, GE, Corning, DBL Investors, and the Westly Group. Making glass, and the IT needed to tint the glass, is an expensive proposition, but View can lower its production costs as it scales up manufacturing.

View spent 2014 working on growing production at its factory in Mississippi, as well as sales, distribution and marketing. At the beginning of 2014, View was shipping glass that was 50 square feet in size, and the company had installed about 50 projects across North America including a 27,000 square foot project at a hospital in Toronto, and a 37,000 square foot project at a tech center in Louisiana.

View’s windows of course are more expensive to buy than regular windows or cheap shading options like blinds. But View’s customers (premium hotels, corporate offices, etc.) are buying them both to be early adopters of cool tech, but also to reduce energy use and energy costs associated with air conditioning and heating. The coloring effect of View’s window can cool or warm a room, and can cut 20 percent off the costs of heating and cooling, 20 percent off of lighting, and can reduce peak load (electricity at peak times of use) by 25 percent.

View’s window manufacturing process is similar to one that’s used in the semiconductor industry, but using large glass pieces. The windows are made by depositing a 1 micrometer thick layer of tungsten oxide onto a pane of glass, and then that layer is sandwiched by another pane of glass. The original core technology came out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. View also makes the controller system, and the software and apps that can control the window tint from an iPhone.

Solar panels on our cliffs! The Navitus wind farm decision is still blowing hot and cold but personally I feel that it should be a “non starter” in favour of less-obtrusive solar panels. With the local coastline predominantly south-facing, surely Navitus would be able to mount solar panels on the side of our cliffs from Hengistbury Head all along our World Heritage Jurassic Coast as far as Lulworth Cove. This would appease the turbine objectors and still generate loads of lovely loot, erm, electricity, without creating the monstrous offshore eyesore currently proposed. Whilst providing much needed jobs for local window cleaners, enterprising beach hut owners could rig up their TV and kettles and make hot showers available for surfers.

Smart windows will keep buildings cool by turning white: There’s a lot of focus at the moment on making the houses we live in and the buildings we work in more energy efficient, to the point where air conditioning isn’t necessary. There’s still a long way to go before that happens, but a newly-developed smart window should help cut energy bills if it makes it into production. You can insulate walls and the roof of a building easily, but windows are a problem area. We need them to allow light into a building, but you can’t insulate them with typical non-transparent insulation materials. There is an alternative, though, in the form of hydrogels.

Hydrogels are a mix of water and polymer that can be made to react smartly to a changing environment. Existing hydrogels don’t work that well for use in a window because they swell so much when subjected to heat. So, a new hydrogel has been created that is suspended as small beads in a liquid and then sandwiched between two sheets of glass. This new hydrogel reacts to changes in temperature. The window will be transparent below a certain temperature, but beyond that it turns white, and therefore bouncing the light and heat away from the building. In so doing, this passive system can help control the interior temperature of a building on very hot days without the need to turn on expensive AC units.

As the swelling of the hydrogel is controlled effectively, it is viable for use in new smart windows which need to work faultlessly for decades. These windows will surely carry a premium price, but the building owner will recoup the cost and then some in lower, or even non-existent AC power bills.

A rendering of the interior of the new Vikings stadium.

For Vikings stadium's bird-safe glass, 3M might have solution: The Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority is in talks with the Vikings, 3M Co. and the Audubon Society about testing possible "bird-safe window film solutions" for the team's new stadium in Minneapolis, chairwoman Michele Kelm-Helgen said Wednesday. Environmental advocates say the stadium's large walls of transparent glass will be deadly for migrating birds, which can't distinguish between actual objects and reflections. The advocates have been pushing for "fritted," or patterned, glass to deter bird collisions, and some even called for the ouster of Kelm-Helgen last month over the issue.

"We are continuing to ... explore the possibility of a study that would occur during bird migratory seasons in various locations in Minnesota," Kelm-Helgen said in a statement. "The proposed plan would be to include the stadium in the study once it is built." The authority has agreed to a lights-out policy to deter bird collisions but has rejected proposals to install fritted glass -- which was estimated to cost about $1 million -- because the glass would mar the transparent look it wants for the new facility. The new stadium will have about 190,000 square feet of glass.

Kelm-Helgen said the latest "initial conversations" regarding a solution "have been positive and productive." "We are hopeful that we will have more information to share in the near future," she said. Testing could begin in spring 2015 and continue in the fall.

Kelm-Helgen said state Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, asked the authority to meet with the Audubon Society about the potential new solution. Dibble said it's still early in the talks, but the 3M product could maintain the transparent, open feel that stadium officials want but still make the glass visible to birds. "It seems to be, if it works, the thing that would solve everyone's problem," he said.

Dibble said that if additional bird safety measures aren't forthcoming, he plans in the next legislative session to push to require the stadium authority to implement them.

Matthew Anderson, executive director of Audubon Minnesota, said it's unclear whether the new solution would be as safe for birds as fritted glass. The stadium sits in the Mississippi flyway, Anderson said, a "superhighway" for migrating birds. He said research has shown more than 980 million birds die each year in North America as a result of flying into buildings. Many details still must be worked out, Anderson said, but "we've got the right players having the right conversation." It's unclear what the 3M product is, how much it would cost, and whether the authority or the team would pay the bill. A call to 3M was not returned. A Vikings spokesman deferred comment to the authority. The glass is to be installed in early 2015. The $1 billion stadium is scheduled to open in 2016.

Who Wants a Supertall Skyline? The Emerging Aesthetic of the 1,000-Foot Tower - When you’re putting up a multi­billion-dollar tower that’s a quarter-mile high, there’s not much leeway to make it a work of art. On the other hand, when you’re putting up a multibillion-­dollar tower that’s a quarter-mile high, it had damn well better be a work of art. Dozens of supertall buildings are being built or planned, radically redrawing the skyline. If we avert our gaze, we’ll get a bundle of glass stakes fencing off the air above ­Manhattan. Skyscrapers can be better. The difficulty of making an elegant symbolic presence out of an immense vertical machine has been vexing architects for more than a century. And yet it must be done.

Too many high-gloss behemoths are so superficially designed that they betray at least part of their mandate. The coming flock glories in the upward thrust, but the earliest skyscraper designers groped toward a vertical style. They enlarged European precedents, creating piled-up palazzos encrusted with giant cornices, columns, and pediments. Sullivan’s generation divided the tower into three parts — evoking a column’s base, shaft, and capital; a tree’s roots, trunk, and branches; or a drama’s exposition, denouement, and conclusion. Sullivan saw in this the natural, and therefore sublime, expression of what a building does: high-ceilinged shops on the bottom, in the middle a warren of offices repeating as many times as necessary, topped by a windowless attic. “Form ever follows function,” he declared, a formulation slightly less terse and much less prescriptive than the modernist battle cry it inspired: Form follows function! The recent image of the two window cleaners dangling on a cockeyed plank at One World Trade dramatized the disjunction between an implacably geometric juggernaut and the messy frailty of individual lives. The architectural challenge of supertall buildings is to accommodate humans in structures of inhuman scale.

Because today’s economics permit a tiny number of largely absent owners to have a disproportionate impact on the skyline, these buildings invert the rationale that propelled skyscraper construction for more than a century. Instead of packing the largest number of people onto the smallest patch of earth, they fill up the skyline with vacant acres of glassed-in parquet. These are mostly generic products masquerading as luxury goods: stratospheric views, ceilings high enough to echo, and features like on-site pet spas. This bounty of comforts is usually wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass, which facilitates the imperial gaze — or pretends to. Actually, the glass wall maligns traditional windows, which provide both openings and shelter. You can’t appreciate a vista with your shins, or see much through the glass above your head. The layouts of these crystalline crows’ nests afford nowhere to retreat from contact with the sky. They offer the thrill of simulated exposure. No wonder the owners maintain a selection of cozier homes.

It’s not enough just to gawp at these towers’ bravado or grumble at the arrogance of the hyperrich gobbling up the sky. Like it or not, the elongated condo is an ever more assertive category of New York architecture, and it too can function as a form of public art. The combination of slenderness and height means that skyscrapers can sprout from modest lots, minimizing their impact on the street and narrowing the shadows they cast. The fact that they contain the caviar of real estate means that they can afford the luxury of being good. We have to live with the follies of the outlandishly wealthy; we can at least insist that they pamper themselves in a way that also enriches the city.