When used on cars, 3E Nano Inc.'s adds metal to the coating, which when activated can be used to defrost and defog car windows in seconds flat. (Michael Dick/CBC)
The federal government is investing $2.7 million in a local company to develop a coating for windows that can turn them into a transparent insulated wall and defrost car windows in mere seconds.
According to an announcement Tuesday by Kitchener South–Hespeler MP Marwan Tabbara, the funding will support clean technology being developed by Kitchener’s 3E Nano Inc.
The company started working on the coating back in 2006, co-founder Nicholas Komarnycky told CBC K-W.
It was originally intended for use in the solar energy sector, but Komarnycky said they soon learned it had other applications where it worked far better: on building and car windows.
In both applications, the coating controls solar energy as it passes through the coating on its way to the window glass.
“If you have sunlight coming into a room through a window, we can reflect the heat portion away from it coming into the room,” said Komarnycky. “Essentially it behaves like a transparent insulated wall.”
When used on cars, 3E Nano Inc. adds a transparent metal to the coating, which when activated can be used to defrost and defog car windows.
“If you put this coating on a windshield, it can uniformly heat the coating from top to bottom, left to right — the whole windshield. And you can actually defrost and deice a window in a matter of seconds.”
The investment will be used to bring the prototype into production and create between 30 and 33 jobs.