Buildings consume 32% of our global energy supply. That’s expected to double by 2050. Designing facades like the skins of biological organisms, with dynamic multilayered optical reconfigurability, would enable homeostasis-like environmental responsiveness and significantly improved energy efficiency. Check out the link to a system developing an adaptive building interface, leveraging confined multilayered fluids to achieve a versatile library of shading, scattering, and selectively absorbing solar responses. Configurable optimization of this “building-scale microfluidic” platform can reduce energy consumption by 43%, moving us toward net-zero buildings.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2210351120