Design of VO2-coated silicon microspheres for thermally-regulating paint

Recent work has proposed an approach to design materials that regulate their own temperature. The concept is based on a temperature-dependent thermal emitter that has minimal emissivity below a target temperature, and maximal emissivity above it. Here we propose a microparticle approach suitable for scaling to large areas. We use electromagnetic and thermal simulations to show that the designed particles provide a 13x reduction in temperature variation relative to an uncoated aluminum substrate.