UBCO Researchers Discover New Glass Technology

Researchers at UBC Okanagan have discovered new glass technology which could change the way we use light.

At the Kelowna campus, researchers found that coating a small piece of glass with extremely thin layers of metal like silver makes it possible to enhance the amount of light coming through the glass.

“Engineers are constantly trying to expand the scope of materials that they can use for display technologies, and having thin, inexpensive, see-through components that conduct electricity will be huge,” said UBC Associate Professor and lead investigator Kenneth Chau. “I think one of the most important implications of this research is the potential to integrate electronic capabilities into windows and make them smart.”

The new discovery could make it possible to advance technologies from windowpanes to other glass objects. Researchers will now work to incorporate their inventions into windows with an aim to selectively filter light and heat waves, depending on the season or time of day.

The theory underlying the research was developed by Chau and collaborator Loïc Markley, an assistant professor of engineering at UBC. Chau and Markley questioned what would happen if they reversed the practice of applying glass over metal—a typical method used in the creation of low-e window coatings.

“It’s been known for quite a while that you could put glass on metal to make metal more transparent, but people have never put metal on top of glass to make glass more transparent,” said Markley. “It’s counter-intuitive to think that metal could be used to enhance light transmission, but we saw that this was actually possible, and our experiments are the first to prove it.”

The two researchers will have their discovery published in the Nature Publishing Group’s open access journal Scientific Reports.