Design and energy analysis of tunable nanophotonic infrared filter based on thermochromic vanadium dioxide

•A mid-infrared tunable nanophotonic filter is designed by placing a spacer layer between two vanadium dioxide films on a thick transparent substrate.•Transfer matrix formulation incorporated with the ray-tracing method is used for the optical modeling of radiative properties.•A transmittance peak near 4 µm wavelength is achieved based on Fabry–Perot resonance which can be disabled with VO2 phase transition.•Thermal energy analysis is theoreretically performed for both dynamic energy dissipation and thermal camouflage applications with the tunable filter.•Effects of VO2 and Si spacer layer thicknesses on the tunable transmittance and application performance are studied.