Green architecture is taking over the world; at least some parts of the world, that is. In the place I live in, it might take a good decade or two to even arrive but it seems like those who are consumed by it are growing in numbers at an alarmingly nice rate. While most green structures talk about maintaining room temperatures with amazing natural insulation, the windows are the ones that are often neglected. Windows in the U.S. consume 30 percent of building heating and cooling energy, representing an annual impact of 4.1 quadrillion BTU of primary energy! (Some of these things can really pile p when you count them.)
Researchers at Guardian Industries have recently unveiled a new breed of vacuum-glazed super glass with an incredible R12-R13 insulation rating. For those of you who know nothing about R-value (much like me), this is an incredible insulation value for glass. Typical insulation brick and plaster walls usually have an R12 rating, and glass usually gets a R1 or R2. That means this new vacuum glass is as thick as an insulated wall. Using the same principle as a vacuum thermos bottle, these glass panels essentially negate two principal modes of heat transfer, paving the way towards windows that actually supply thermal energy instead of leaking it.
Using the same principle as a vacuum thermos bottle, researchers at Guardian industries have created a thin .25mm space between two sheets of glass that is vacuum-sealed to 10–4 torr. This means that more and more green buildings across the planet can be more thermally efficient and can also make sure that they save loads of energy. It would be nice to know if the normal windows can be converted to thermally efficient ones so that the existing houses can be converted in to greener structures. I suppose all the technically inclined architects would be jumping up and down when reading this. But I know nothing about the technicalities so I’ll just leave it to the experts. It still sounds like a damn good invention for now!
