Anti-reflective coating used on solar panel glass enhances energy conversion efficiency
Solar cells have become one of the lowest cost and most efficient renewable energy solutions in converting light energy into electrical or thermal energy. Today, solar cells have many applications in fields such as electronics, industry, transportation and healthcare. However, in order to exploit the maximum capacity of solar cells, it is necessary to solve a number of technical and technological problems, including the fabrication of anti-reflective coatings for the protective plate glass of solar cells. The anti-reflective coating has a closed surface structure that increases the light transmission of the sheet glass, reduces light reflection and improves the energy conversion efficiency of the solar cell while ensuring resistance to dust collection of the protective glass using a special manufacturing technology: creating a multi-layer porous film with a sealed surface, thereby reducing the refractive index of the film significantly.
For the above reasons, a group of scientists from the Institute of Tropical Technology has successfully researched the SiO2-TiO2 anti-reflective glass coating film with a closed surface structure in the form of nanocomposites of nanometer-sized particles TiO2 and SiO2. The size of the SiO2 nanoparticles is in the range of 10-30 nm, which meets the technical criteria of a solar cell protective glass film. The light transmittance of the battery protective glass significantly increases after coating the SiO2-TiO2 nanocomposite, specifically increasing from 90.2% to 97.5 % at 550 nm, which enhances the conversion efficiency of the cells but still ensures the anti-dust requirements of the glass.
The task was granted 01 Patent for Utility Solution: “Process for manufacturing anti-reflective coating and background with anti-reflective coating", according to Decision 20406w/QD-SHTT dated November 24, 2022 of the National Office of Intellectual Property, the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The task published 01 article in the prestigious international journal (SCIE) Materials Letters, No. 326 (2022), 132921; 01 article in a specialized domestic magazine; and guided 01 Master student who defended the graduation thesis with excellent results.
The product of the initial task has been interested by a number of domestic solar panel manufacturing and assembling enterprises and has signed a cooperation agreement to continue developing applications on industrial production lines.
Patented Utility Solution, product of the task
Surface and cross-sectional SEM images of coating films with different number of coating times: (a,b) 1 time, (b,c) 2 times, (e,f) 3 times and (g,h) 4 times
Optical transmittance of single-layer and 1-sided SiO2/TiO2 anti-reflective film on glass substrate with different SiO2:TiO2 ratios
Wetting angle of anti-reflective SiO2/TiO2 film after scanning 1, 2, 3, 4 times on glass
Installing a solar panel system using anti-reflective glass to measure efficiency
Translated by Phuong Huyen
Link to Vietnamese version
