Enhancing the aesthetic aspect of the solar systems used as facades for building by designing multi-layer optical coatings

The design of zero-energy buildings can be depending on the effective integration of solar energy systems with building envelopes, where these systems save heat and electricity as well as enhance the aesthetic aspect of the facades. In this paper, the aspects related to the effective integration of buildings with solar energy systems (solar cells and collectors) will be discussed, as well as enhancing the aesthetic aspect of the facades, and since solar energy systems are visible to everyone, their design must adapt to the building structure and the surrounding environment. Solar energy system designers, architects, physicists and other contributors to building energy envelopes must consider the comprehensive concept of it, where buildings are part of the human and social environment and in close relationship with the natural environment, through the use of thin films technology through the design of multi-layers colored optical coatings covering solar panels for building facades. Accordingly, the energy sector should be seen as an area of aesthetic creativity. Two dielectric materials were used, the first is ThF4 with a high refractive index (1.5143) and the second is LiF with a low refractive index (1.393) and for several odd layers, starting from 3 layers and up to 21 layers and for a thicknesses of a quarter wavelength. The design Air/L/H/Glass was applied by the Mat Lab program for the seven colors of the spectrum, So, the aim of this research is determined in designing colored optical coatings for solar systems that enhance the aesthetic aspect of building facades, as well as generating thermal and electrical energy needed to operate the buildings and to find out which color has the best visible reflectivity and solar transmittance better than the rest of the spectrum, all the results exhibit that yellow color has the higher visible reflectivity and higher merit factor, so it is consider the most efficient color for coloring the solar systems than the rest of colors spectrum.

COMPARISON OF ALGORITHMS FOR DETERMINING THE THICKNESS OF OPTICAL COATING LAYERS BASED ON THE MONOCHROMATIC MONITORING DATA

The reverse engineering problem of determining the layer thicknesses of deposited optical coatings from on-line monochromatic measurements is considered. To solve this inverse problem, non-local algorithms are proposed that use all the data accumulated during the deposition process. For the proposed algorithms, the accuracy of solving the inverse problem is compared in the presence of random and systematic errors. It is shown that in the case when the measured data contains only random errors, the best accuracy is provided by the algorithm based on minimizing the discrepancy functional. In the case of systematic errors, the advantage of one the algorithms based on minimizing the variance functionals is demonstrated. Key words: inverse problems, reverse engineering, optical coatings, thin films.

ON THE ACCELERATION OF OPTIMIZATION METHODS FOR THE PROBLEM OF SYNTHESIS OF MULTILAYER OPTICAL COATINGS

Five ways to speed up the multidimensional search in order to solve the problem of synthesis of multilayer optical coatings by using the methods of zero and first orders have been considered. The first way is to use an analytical derivative for the target quality function of the multilayer coating. It allows us to calculate accurately (within the computer arithmetic) the value of the gradient of a smooth objective function and generalized gradient of a non-smooth objective one. The first way requires the same number of arithmetic operations as well as finite-difference methods of calculating the gradient and the generalized gradient. The second way is to use a speedy finding of the objective function gradient using the prefix- and suffix-arrays in the analytical method of calculating the gradient. This technique allows us to reduce the number of arithmetic operations thrice for large-scale problems. The third way is the use of tabulating the values of trigonometric functions to calculate the characteristic matrices. This technique reduces the execution time of multiplication operations of characteristic matrices ten times depending on the computer’s specifications. For some computer architectures, this advantage is more than 140 times. The fourth method is the use of the golden section method for the one-dimensional optimization in the problems of synthesis of optical coatings. In particular, when solving one partial problem it is shown that the ternary search method requires approximately 40% more time than the golden section method. The fifth way is to use the effective implementation of multiplication of two matrices. It lies in changing the order of the second and third cycles for the well-known method of multiplying two matrices and fixing in a common variable value of the element of the first matrix. This allows us to speed up significantly the multiplication operation of two matrices. For matrices having 1000 x 1000 dimension the acceleration is from 2 to 15 times, depending on the computer's specifications.