Improved performance of thermochromic VO2/SiO2 coatings prepared by low-temperature pulsed reactive magnetron sputtering: Prediction and experimental verification

The paper deals with thermochromic VO2/SiO2 coatings prepared by low-temperature pulsed reactive magnetron sputtering on conventional soda-lime glass substrates without any substrate bias and without any interlayer. Thermochromic VO2 layers were deposited using reactive high-power impulse magnetron sputtering with a pulsed O2 flow control at a substrate surface temperature of 300 °C. Antireflection SiO2 layers were deposited using mid-frequency bipolar dual magnetron sputtering onto the top of VO2 layers at a surface temperature below 35 °C in order to improve the optical and mechanical performance. We focus on the dependence of the luminous transmittance (Tlum) and the modulation of the solar transmittance (ΔTsol) on the SiO2 layer thickness. The measured dependencies are in good agreement with those predicted using properties of pure VO2 layers measured by spectroscopic ellipsometry. Two different VO2 layer thicknesses (30 and 88 nm) have been used to demonstrate the tradeoff between Tlum and ΔTsol. We show an improvement due to the SiO2 overlayer of up to 16% (from 40.3% to 56.3%) for Tlum measured at 25 °C and up to 2.6% (from 7.7% to 10.3%) for ΔTsol. The results are important for the design and low-temperature fabrication of high-performance durable thermochromic VO2-based coatings for smart window applications.