Xiulin Ruan
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Heating and cooling buildings uses a large share of the world's energy. Low-emissivity (low-e) coatings help by reflecting heat radiation, which keeps indoor temperatures steady in both summer and winter.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
low-emissivity coatings
low-e coatings
conductive polymers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Use high-throughput machine learning to identify the optical constants needed for high visible transparency and low infrared emissivity, and how dopant choice and doping level in n-PBDF can achieve them.
- Develop scalable fabrication of two-layer n-PBDF low-e coatings and determine how interactions between layers affect polymer texture, optical behavior and performance.
- Evaluate the durability and energy-saving potential of n-PBDF coatings under ultraviolet light, moisture, rain washout and temperature extremes.
More about the research
Most of these coatings are made from metals, though. Metals can make them costly and complex to produce, harder to scale up, and limited in appearance. This project develops a new type of low-e paint based on a conductive polymer, a plastic that carries electric charge. The goal is a coating that can be applied from solution and still saves energy.
Why it matters
Building owners and builders need cheaper ways to cut heating and cooling energy. Paint-on, polymer-based low-e coatings could replace metal-based films with materials that are easier to make at scale and more flexible in appearance. This could make energy-efficient windows and surfaces more widely available and reduce building energy use.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Julian Wang
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Decompose global solar irradiance into its spectral bands to build a time-dependent model of near-infrared (NIR) light, the invisible heat-carrying part of sunlight, reaching building windows.
Hang Liu
Washington State University, WA·Materials Science·Early-career
Determine how spinneret geometry shapes side-by-side fiber formation when an intrinsically conductive polymer is co-spun with a conventional spinnable polymer in a wet-spinning process.
Chih-Hao Chang
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Materials Science
Establish scalable patterning processes to fabricate nanolattices and their nanoscale building blocks with precisely controlled geometry and material composition.
The school
Purdue University: 43 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 833 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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