It’s estimated that 10 percent of all the energy used in buildings in the U.S. can be attributed to window performance, costing building owners about $50 billion annually, yet the high cost of replacing windows or retrofitting them with an energy efficient coating is a major deterrent. Users at the Molecular Foundry are seeking to address this problem with creative chemistry—a polymer heat-reflective coating that can be painted on at one-tenth the cost.
The technology being developed at the Foundry relies on a type of material called a bottlebrush polymer, which, as its name suggests, has one main rigid chain of molecules with bristles coming off the sides. This unusual molecular architecture lends it some unique properties, one being that it doesn’t entangle easily.
As a graduate student at Caltech, Raymond Weitekamp worked on understanding and controlling how bottlebrush polymers self-assemble into nanostructures behaving as photonic crystals, which can selectively reflect light at different frequencies. Last year he came to Berkeley Lab as part of Cyclotron Road, a program for entrepreneurial researchers, to commercialize these coatings and other related polymer-based technologies. He has been working on the development of polymeric materials as a user at the Molecular Foundry.