Sol-gel spin coating of dielectric reflector for energy harvesting and heat shielding applications

There are seasonal changes in the environment temperature which leads to additional usage of various devices like air-conditioners in the summer season and space heaters in the winter season. The usage of this equipment incurs increased consumption of electricity that can result in increased usage costs. High usage of air conditioners also releases large amounts of fluorocarbons that can contribute to global warming. Hence, to minimize the usage of air-conditioners and to protect from the seasonal temperature changes it is necessary to mold the light, which can be done by dielectric optical coatings. These coatings are derived from the thin films of varying refractive index that can be fabricated by many bottom-up techniques available in nanotechnology. Herein, we report one of the bottom-up technique i.e., sol-gel spin coating technique for the fabrication of a dielectric reflector that can serve as a window for the seasonal temperature changes by filtering the ultraviolet and near-infrared spectra. The fabricated reflector was investigated with FE-SEM for thickness and layer identification and UV-VIS-NIR spectroscopy analysis for the reflectance analysis.