Smart glass

A newly-developed coating could enable buildings to have antireflective self-cleaning windows and could increase the efficiency of solar cells. When generating energy from solar cells, you have to fight for every percentage gain in efficiency - Ulli Steiner Porous films, which use similar properties to those seen in moth eyes in combination with nanoparticles, are being developed into robust, self-cleaning antireflective coatings for use on both plastic and glass. Details of the coatings, which were developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, were recently outlined in the journal Nano Letters. Antireflective coatings need to refract as little light as possible in order to be effective, but it is extremely difficult to produce them as a single layer. Over the past decade, researchers have developed distributed coatings, which resolve this by mimicking the structure of moth eyes. The antireflective properties of moth eyes come not from a single layer, but from a hexagonal pattern of tiny bumps. The spaces between these bumps are so small that incoming beams of light see the eye's surface as a single layer, essentially removing the interface between the air and the surface, allowing moths to see at night and be less visible to predators.