Where can we find PDLC smart glass?
You can find PDLC glass in commercial and residential smart windows, consumer electronics and display cases for retail and museums, as well as in healthcare, hospitality and transportation.
PDLC smart glass is composed of :
Outermost panels of normal float glass (or sometimes acrylic) sandwiched around:
Inner panels of optically clear PET plastic (polyethylene terephthalate), sandwiched around:
ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) which is a transparent conductor, sandwiched around:
a PDLC core comprised of liquid crystal droplets, suspended in a polymer.
You can find PDLC glass in commercial and residential smart windows, consumer electronics and display cases for retail and museums, as well as in healthcare, hospitality and transportation.
Not at all; common examples of natural occurrences of liquid crystals include proteins, soaps, detergents, and even some types of clay.
The polymer allows the liquid crystals to be embedded into a film, which can then be sandwiched between panels of glass or plastic. The polymer has constant optical properties which do not vary across its structure, and hence is considered isotropic.
In contrast, the liquid crystal itself is anisotropic, since its optical characteristics are not constant across its structure, but rather can vary under application of an electric field.
Transportation
Architectural (residential and commercial)
Interior design
Retail advertising
Healthcare (i.e. hospitals and clinics, since the PDLC smart glass can replace unhygienic curtains and blinds which often carry microbes and germs, and this also improves air quality)
Banking, thanks to the privacy afforded to ATMs and as internal partitions
Hospitality, especially bathrooms, since more natural light can penetrate interior spaces lacking windows to the outside world.
The smartness of PDLCs is a result of its ability to change its transparency (technically called the transmittance) when an electrical stimulus is applied to it. This is normally by way of an alternating voltage, which exerts an alternating electric field across the PDLC material.
Nevertheless, the PDLC is only as smart as the control system which stimulates the change, which can be driven by a push button switch, a light sensor, or a building automation system.
The liquid crystals change their refractive index in relation to the isotropically transparent polymer in which they are immersed, thereby creating multiple step boundaries throughout the PDLC.
It is this change in refractive index at each boundary which causes light to change course. Since the PDLC material contains millions of liquid crystals, each with a boundary facing a slightly different way, the light is scattered in many directions.
The net effect is to hide whatever is behind the PDLC smart glass.
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