Toray Industries, Inc. (head office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo; President Akihiro Nikkaku; hereinafter referred to as “Toray”) announced today that it has developed an innovative solor control film that, along with maintaining glass-like transparency, possesses one of the world’s highest levels of heat reflection properties with respect to infrared radiation from the sun that causes temperature increase. This was achieved by further burnishing Toray’s proprietary nano-layering technology and employing an innovative layered layout design. Toray will continue with the development aiming for commercialization in three years while working on improving the heat reflection properties further.
Against the backdrop of global warming, energy saving and CO2 reduction measures are being sought, and reducing the cooling burden of buildings is one such measure, the requirements for which have been increasing. Effective measures to control the cooling burden include multi-layered glass and solor control films that block infrared rays from the sun, and many such solor control materials are being sold.
The nano-layered film PICASUS®1), which Toray brought to the market in 2008, is made by layering hundreds to thousands of nanoscale films and has the function to reflect light of specific wavelengths depending on the thickness of the layers and the layout design. Conventional nano-layering technologies faced the issue of discoloration of film when efforts were made to improve infrared reflection properties. In this new technology, however, Toray succeeded in ensuring both high transparency and heat reflection properties, which were difficult to achieve with existing nano-layering technologies, through highly precise thickness control for each nano-layer and introducing the innovative layered layout design.
In solor control tests, using a new measurement method that looks at ingredient based on sunlight in cooling load, conducted at the environmental test chamber of joint research partner National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology’s Chubu Center, the newly developed highly transparent solor control film with high reflection properties demonstrated 39% better reduction in cooling load compared to regular clear glass and 11% better compared to high-performance, transparent solor control films available in the market.
Technical details of the solor contorol film are as follows:
１．Innovative layered layout design
In the layered layout design used in conventional nano-layered films, when you try to improve the infrared reflection property, the visible light that causes coloring also is reflected simultaneously in principle. In order to address that, Toray introduced the innovative layered layout design which, while controlling the reflection of visible light, improved the infrared blocking capability alone to achieve the world’s best solor control performance.
２．High precision film layering technology
In the aforementioned innovative layer thickness design, it is necessary to control the layer thickness in 1 nm2)units for each layer of the hundreds of layers. Towards that end, Toray combined equipment design based on its proprietary flow simulation technology and a very highly precise coating process that enabled uniform control over the entire film even for a layer thickness of 1nm. This will enable the company to offer solor control films that are large enough for window panes of office buildings, etc.
This development also incorporates the successes of the R&D project on innovative technologies for utilization of unused thermal energy (consignee: TherMAT [Thermal Management Materials and Technology Research Association]) commissioned by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) as well as the Strategic Energy Saving Technology Innovation Program of NEDO (grant period: from June 2017).
Toray will continue to leverage its core technologies of organic synthetic chemistry, polymer chemistry, bio-technology and nano-technology, and promote research and technology development of innovative materials that can fundamentally change the society, and in doing so will work to realize the Toray Group’s corporate founding philosophy of “Contributing to society through the creation of new values.”
