Project description
Self-powered intelligent shading system for buildings
Modern energy-efficient building facades have smart shading systems that can reconfigure themselves automatically, helping to regulate the brightness and temperature of the building interior in relation to external conditions. The EU-funded project AIRSHADE is developing the world’s first air-powered shading system for buildings. The idea is that when sunlight warms the facade, the air inside the system heats up, expands and builds up pressure that pushes out the actuator and opens the shutters. When the environment cools (or sun intensity weakens), the shutters close allowing more light to penetrate. Compared to state-of-the-art systems, AIRSHADE's system opens and closes according to the sun's intensity, thus regulating the temperature of the building, requiring no power or embedded sensors to operate.
Objective
Airshade has developed and patented a self-sustaining and eco-friendly responsive
shading system constructed from sustainable materials, that follows the idea of thermo-sensitivity to
solar exposure and requires only air pressure to operate. Responsive solar shading systems have been
emerging for the past few decades, but they are all controlled by electricity, cables and motors.
Airshade is improving on the current state of the art through a responsive solar shading system which
reduces costs, in terms of production, installation and maintenance, carbon footprint, as it is built
from sustainable materials, and energy consumption used for residential heating and cooling, all
while requiring no electricity to operate.
Airshade is addressing the needs of a significant global market consisting of professionals
involved in the construction industry, such as architects, engineers, planners, builders and building
consultants, as well as billions of end-users - people who live and work in buildings. There are
hundreds of thousands of architects, builders and engineers/consultants in the EU only, while end-
user are essentially all house owners, which means millions in the EU and billions globally.
Professionals in the construction industry need to achieve today’s required sustainability standards by
applying efficient building products and systems, while end-users can benefit from a cost-efficient
responsive shading system. To this very large pool of potential customers, Airshade offers an
innovative responsive shading system which significantly improves upon current solutions, delivering
the same benefits as the most advanced state of the art, but without all the inconveniences and at a
very competitive price. Created by a diverse, young and most importantly, environmentally conscious team, Airshade is a
pioneering, award-winning concept.Working in the most resource-consuming industry on the planet, Airshade considers sustainability as default rather than an exception.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energy
- social sciencessociologyindustrial relationsautomation
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyplanetary sciencesplanets
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationsmobile phones
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
Netherlands