With the growing awareness of the impact of climate change and the need to conserve energy, smart window technologies have emerged as a promising solution. Liquid crystal/polymer composites-based switchable windows, such as PDLC, PSLC, and PSCT, offer the ability to regulate both privacy and radiant energy flow. In this study, we investigated the potential of these windows and identified methods to enhance their capabilities. Our results indicate that PDLC and PSCT windows with the appropriate film thickness have the potential to control radiant energy flow, while also providing improved privacy and comfort for building occupants.
We developed a unidirectionally aligned PDLC film with liquid crystal (LC) droplets permanently aligned along the film’s normal direction using the polymer stabilization method. Due to the unidirectional alignment of LC droplets, the aligned PDLC film shows selective scattering: it scatters light with a large incident angle but remains transparent for the small incident angles. We studied the selective scattering properties of aligned PDLC and optimized its electro-optical performance to use as a light efficiency enhancement film. The optimized aligned PDLC film increases the light efficiency of a Quantum Dot (QD) backlight film by about 20%. This aligned PDLC film can also improve the light efficiency of other flat panel displays like OPED, MLED, etc.
In this paper, we aim to show that liquid crystal films (LCs) with well-defined molecular orientations are an exceptional platform for flat optical devices based on the Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase. Especially, the development of plasmonic photopatterning technique in recent years has made it easy to align liquid crystal molecules in to designer orientation patterns with both high spatial resolution and high throughput and thus enables large scale manufacturing liquid crystal optical devices with low costs. Here we present liquid crystal laser beam shapers and microlenses as two examples to illustrate the design principles and the fabrication processes for liquid crystal flat optical elements. In comparison with flat optical devices made of plasmonic or dielectric metasurfaces, liquid crystal flat optical elements are advantageous due to the high optical efficiencies and low fabrication costs.
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