Reconfigurable Assemblies for Multi-Modal and Multi-State Thermoregulation of Buildings

About This Grant

This grant will support research that explores how mechanically morphable and modular assemblies can be integrated with optical metamaterials to enable new ways to control radiant heat. In recent years, scientific application of origami – transforming flat surfaces into complex 3D shapes – has expanded the concept to a range of designs that can fold, twist, or otherwise morph into different shapes on demand. These designs, in turn, have been explored as deployable structures for applications ranging from robotics to medical devices. However, controlling light and radiant heat using assemblies made from optical materials is an unexplored idea that holds promise for a range of applications. For example, assemblies that morph to reveal materials that reflect sunlight, or materials that absorb it, could enable roofs to shield buildings from solar heat in the summer, and absorb it for warmth in the winter. This would improve US public health by ensuring thermal comfort, and energy security by lowering building energy demands. More fundamentally, putting different optical materials on the facets of mechanically morphing origami could yield different combinations of their properties. This award supports fundamental research examining how modular origami patterns (e.g. square-twist, Kresling), can be made from optical metamaterials, and how their mechanical configurations can yield control of the wavelengths and direction of solar and thermal radiation interacting with the origami assemblies. Beyond potentially opening a new field at the intersection of optical and mechanical design, this project will enhance graduate and undergraduate engineering education, and through potential commercialization of intellectual property, create and employ a US STEM workforce. An outreach strategy is planned to engage students from K-12 to graduate levels in the field, to foster STEM participation in preparation for future engineering challenges. This project seeks to integrate plasmonic and polymer/dielectric optical metamaterials on the panels of morphing and reconfigurable modular origami (e.g. chiral Kresling patterns, n-gon twist including square-twist), to realize tunable multispectral (solar, thermal infrared), multimodal (reflectance, transmittance, absorptance/emittance), and directional control of thermal radiation, beyond what current static and adaptive optical designs can achieve. As such, it seeks to yield the first fundamental and technical insights into the relatively unexplored, but extremely rich space of opto-mechanical tuning enabled by the integration of spectral and directional selectivities of optical materials, with geometrical control and mechanisms of modular multifunctional origami assemblies. For building thermoregulation, this could represent a new building envelope paradigm with an unprecedented ability to respond to the spatiotemporally varying thermal environment. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.