WORLD
Feel-good glass coating could increase your quality of life
Baku, July 11 (AZERTAC). As we previously mentioned in many of our articles about architecture, abundance of daylight is very important since it influences our mood and efficiency since it stimulates the brain. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute have worked with industry partners to develop a coating for panes of glass that lets through more light at wavelengths which govern our hormonal balance.
You probably noted that persons with mood or even appetite disorders wear glasses which promote different wavelengths of light (or even glasses in some color). Another thing you might have noted is that well lit and airy environments increase your productivity. That`s no surprise, since daylight gives us energy and has a major impact on our sense of well-being.
Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky enough to live in a generously glazed home or bright and breezy working space. Modern heat-insulating, sun-protection glazing for glass doesn`t make things any better, since it isn`t optimized to allow the light that governs our hormonal balance to pass through. Those coating only reflect a part of the spectrum and lets a percentage of incident sunlight to pass through.
Anti-reflective glass that is more transmissive overall to daylight is reserved for certain special applications, such as in glass covers for photovoltaic modules or in glazing for shop windows. The aim with this kind of glass is to avoid nuisance reflections and to achieve maximum light transmission at the peak emission wavelength of sunlight. This is the wavelength at which the human retina is also most sensitive to light.
“However, our biorhythms are not affected by the wavelengths that brighten a room the most, but rather by blue light”, said graduate engineer Walther Glaubitt, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research (Fraunhofer ISC) in Würzburg. That is why he and his team have developed glass that is designed to be particularly transmissive to light in the blue part of the spectrum. The secret is a special, long-lasting and barely perceptible inorganic coating that is only 0.1 micrometers thick.
According to its developers, the coating makes you feel as if the window is permanently open. One reason the glass gives this impression is that it exhibits maximum transmission at wavelengths between 450 and 500 nanometers – which is exactly where the effects of blue light are at their strongest.