Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

This research program aims to develop new innovative coatings and to integrate them into advanced responsive building façades in order to reduce the building energy demand drastically, while increasing building resiliency. To reach these scopes, nanotechnologies offer a new paradigm for enhancing building performance, although they pose significant challenges in controlling their thermo-physical behavior, especially under outdoor conditions. The current proposal aims to develop several coatings that will have high thermal resistance (e.g., including air pressure dried aerogel coatings), dynamic solar reflectivity (e.g., using thermochromic or photochromic coatings), or and selective solar radiation absorption (e.g., utilizing smart coatings with tunable albedos, such as photonic, fluorescent materials and quantum dots). The proposed research aims to understand critical properties and performance opportunities while assessing the failure mechanisms in these advanced building coatings. Due to the nature of the construction industry, stakeholders are rarely attracted by preliminary laboratory findings of overly innovative materials, so extensive development and testing of new building materials requires performance proofs on a large scale and under realistic scenarios too. Moreover, studying the aging effects of weathering and durability factors for any new building material is critical. Dr. Berardi's previous works have shown substantial improvements of new nanotechnology products for building insulation, so far realized in small-size lab samples. This program will continue to explore new opportunities to prepare new coatings and to investigate how these behave once introduced into full-scale building systems under outdoor long-term testing. The research program will yield a deeper fundamental knowledge of the heat transfer mechanism and lighting interactions at nano scale and aging factors of the new building coatings. Investigations will be conducted at the advanced state-of the-art BeTOP laboratory, equipped with several tools recently purchased through CFI and NSERC RTI awards. BeTOP is a unique laboratory that can mimic future climatic scenarios and that allows field testing of large façade modules too. The aging and weathering of the new coatings will provide empirical evidence of their long-term performance under current and future climatic conditions. Following a material inverse design approach, the research will use the results of laboratory characterization, outdoor-field campaigns, and real-field investigations to predict the performance of the new coatings using future weathering factors occurrence. Finally, Given the unique climatic conditions of Canada and the long-term performance requirements of façade coatings, this project will include real building evaluations.