Experimental approaches to evaluate the thermal effectiveness of window coatings

With the increasing desire to improve the energy consumption of buildings, novel coatings have emerged as potential candidates to improve the thermal performance of windows. Performance evaluations of these coating materials in a building application can provide meaningful educational experiences for engineering students. In this study, the thermal effectiveness of Liquid NanoTint ® is examined by undergraduate engineering students using both a “before-and-after” and “side-by-side” design of experiments involving a full-size building and a pair of smaller-scale buildings. Temperature data collected over multiple months enables students to evaluate the performance of the window coating, which is shown to provide tangible improvement in reducing solar heat gain from direct sunlight. The side-by-side approach enables a more controlled comparison for experiments that are dependent on weather conditions. It can also be executed in a shorter duration, allows iteration of experiments, and it provides data that can be more readily synthesized with analytical analysis.