LuxVu Glazing
Developed by Reveo's liquid crystal scientists and engineers, LuxVu allows perfect viewing when clear and complete privacy when opaque. Conventional switchable window glazings suffer from poor performance and high cost, and this has prevented them from ever capturing more than a niche market. A major problem is haze: the "clear" glass looks dirty when viewed from an angle. "We believe that the market for switchable glazing is extremely underdeveloped," said Dr. Sadeg Faris, President and CEO of Reveo, Inc. "Our goals are to eliminate haze and simultaneously reduce costs. Only by achieving both these goals can we hope to break into the mass commercial and residential markets."
To eliminate haze, researchers at Reveo created a unique cholesteric liquid crystal material and a new process for applying the material onto glass sheets. The material is sandwiched between two sheets of conventional float glass and switches from opaque to clear when a voltage is applied. "Our materials outperform electrochromic, suspended particle, and polymer dispersed liquid crystal technologies and show no visible haze at any viewing angle," said Dr. Le Li, Vice President of Advanced Materials Research. In addition, LuxVu glazing is durable enough to withstand 100% humidity, temperatures between -4°F and +140°F, high intensity UV radiation, and over 3 million switching cycles.
Projected manufacturing costs in high volume are below $10/sq.ft, making LuxVu significantly cheaper than the current $25/sq.ft privacy glazings. "We're very proud of the technical breakthroughs that we've made to reach our goals. LuxVu is now poised for commercialization," said Dr. Faris. "We have formed a subsidiary, LuxVu Corp., and are inviting investors and strategic partners to participate in the development of a LuxVu product range." He plans to bring LuxVu to the mass market within a year.
Ongoing research is focused on reflective privacy glazing that switches between a transparent and a mirror-like state. An exciting and important project is to develop switchable, infra-red (IR) reflective external glazing that could be switched to reflect the solar IR radiation in the summer and transmit the solar IR radiation in the winter, saving on both heating and cooling costs.
Reveo, Inc., 8 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532. Tel: 914-345-9556; Fax: 914-345-2095.