Design and Development of a Portable Spectrophotometer for Glass Characterization

Nanometric coatings are becoming increasingly common in architectural and railway glazing. These coatings allow glasses to be endowed with advanced optical properties such as specific colour or rejection of the infrared spectrum. This project involves the design of a portable spectrophotometer to evaluate the performance and degradation of these coatings once the windows have been installed on buildings or trains. This device allows the reflectance and transmittance of different samples to be measured using normal incidence light. In this way, windows of different thicknesses can be characterised without having to change the position of the receiver. A set of measurements of different glazing was carried out and compared with the results obtained with a conventional laboratory spectrophotometer (angle incidence).