DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY PRIZE | SEMIFINALIST
We are excited to announce that our Thermalswitch Building Envelope Extension™ has been selected as a semi-finalist in the Department of Energy’s Building Envelope Innovation Prize. Our team moves into Phase 2 where teams will secure equity-focused pilots in low-income multifamily or underserved public sector buildings as a component of their commercialization plans.
The Building Envelope Innovation Prize is encouraging production of high-performance, cost-effective secondary glazing systems to improve efficiency of commercial windows. The prize is offering $2.1 million in cash prizes to American window innovators to design novel solutions for upgrading inefficient windows to enable building decarbonization retrofits and optimize building envelopes for electrification. The prize will help establish, support, and expand innovation in window systems and catalyze teams to rapidly develop and deploy cost-effective solutions in the secondary glazing systems market. In Phase 2 of the competition, teams will secure equity-focused pilots in low-income multifamily or underserved public sector buildings as a component of their commercialization plans. Learn more about the Building Envelope Innovation Prize here.
As one of seven winning teams, we plan to leverage our Phase 1 $50,000 cash prize by building a high-performance SGS prototype and securing an equity-focused pilot project in Phase 2. We’re excited to work with @EERE’s Building Technologies Office to accelerate the development and production of our lightweight overclad system for existing building retrofits that creates an additional thermal envelope using ETFE foil and air.
A NEW APPROACH TO AN OLD PROBLEM
The Thermalswitch Envelope Extension™ is an overclad adapter panel that creates secondary barriers opposite a new or existing window or opaque wall to capture air for use as a thermal insulator and may be coupled with potential ventilation strategies to pre-condition and filter airborne particulates.
Window replacement in the commercial and residential markets and full-on facade retrofit in the mid to high-rise typologies have become a greater necessity due to the aging and dwindling performance of our existing building stock. However, such replacements or renovations can be a costly expense to the building and homeowners with huge implications for disruption of the building and its occupants, be it residential or commercial. The Thermalswitch Envelope Extension System is designed to resolve the costly replacement, renovation, and disruption to the building occupants while increasing the thermal performance of the existing envelope. The ThermalswitchBEX panel can be installed specifically over glazing systems of all kinds, from storefronts and window walls to structurally silicone glazed curtainwalls and more.
At the core of this concept is:
Creating a second skin to buffer the exterior air from the interior conditioned air while also leveraging the insulative resistance of cavity air to increase the performance of the wall or window assembly.
Utilize a infill membrane barrier, primarily from ETFE film, which is an architectural polymer, weather resistance, flame retardant, and can be imbued with UV/IR cutting properties to limit solar radiation and heat loss/gain. It can also be fritted, tinted, and printed with other various aesthetic and performative coatings.
The Thermalswitch panel is extremely lightweight compared to other overclad panels and can be mounted directly to existing glazing or wall assembly with minimal imposed loads as opposed to a glass retrofit solution.
ETFE film operational thickness is exponentially smaller than glass, and pound per-square-foot relative to embodied carbon, the Thermalswitch system could cover 100 times more area before it equaled the same carbon emissions that a standard glass system.
