Glass in building sector: does the ideal window exist? Review and research on existing advanced glazing technologies towards an adaptive behavior of transparent building components

Building sector is still absorbing nowadays a huge amount of final consumption of the entire country. Within this percentage, heat and gain losses through windows play a significant role. In line with the EU directives on energy efficiency, the whole system needs to change the way of designing, renovating and building in order to reduce energy consumption and harmful emissions. An effective way to achieve this result is to exploit daylight to offer different functional results; being able to act on the dynamic control of heat and light-filtering properties of windows in fact, energy cost and consumption for heating and cooling could be significantly reduced. Glazed components currently on the market do not fit all the performances required to recent regulations in their whole as they are not so spread due to too high-cost and maintenance criticality. The current research aims at analyse and review existing advanced glazing systems to understand how they can be systematized and improved to reach for the definition of a model of a new adaptive building components, able to change its behavior according to the variability of the boundary conditions and at an acceptable cost.