Windows can change as per your mood

Windows can change as per your mood
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Now turn your window cloudy, clear or somewhere in between according to your mood.

Washington D.C.: Now turn your window cloudy, clear or somewhere in between according to your mood.

Researchers have developed a technique that can quickly change the opacity of a window with the flick of a switch.

Tunable windows aren't new but most previous technologies have relied on electrochemical reactions achieved through expensive manufacturing.

It is comprised of a sheet of glass or plastic, sandwiched between transparent, soft elastomers sprayed with a coating of silver nanowires, too small to scatter light on their own.

With an applied voltage, the nanowires on either side of the glass are energized to move toward each other, squeezing and deforming the soft elastomer. As the nanowires are distributed unevenly across the surface, the elastomer deforms unevenly.

The resulting roughness causes light to scatter, turning the glass opaque. Hence the change happens in less than a second.

Current chemical-based controllable windows use vacuum deposition to coat the glass, a process that deposits layers of a material molecule by molecule. It's expensive and painstaking.

The study has been published in Optics Letters.

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