In recent years, a complicated discussion over which direction solar cells should face — south or west — has likely left customers uncertain about the best way to orient their panels. Now researchers are attempting to resolve this issue by developing solar cells that can harvest light from almost any angle, and the panels self-clean to boot. Their report appears in the journal ACS Nano.
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Ref: Packaging Glass with a Hierarchically Nanostructured Surface: A Universal Method to Achieve Self-Cleaning Omnidirectional Solar Cells. ACS Nano (1 December 2015) | DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5b05564
ABSTRACT
Fused-silica packaging glass fabricated with a hierarchical structure by integrating small (ultrathin nanorods) and large (honeycomb nanowalls) structures was demonstrated with exceptional light-harvesting solar performance, which is attributed to the subwavelength feature of the nanorods and an efficient scattering ability of the honeycomb nanowalls. Si solar cells covered with the hierarchically structured packaging glass exhibit enhanced conversion efficiency by 5.2% at normal incidence, and the enhancement went up to 46% at the incident angle of 60°. The hierarchical structured packaging glass shows excellent self-cleaning characteristics: 98.8% of the efficiency is maintained after 6 weeks of outdoor exposure, indicating that the nanostructured surface effectively repels polluting dust/particles. The presented self-cleaning omnidirectional light-harvesting design using the hierarchical structured packaging glass is a potential universal scheme for practical solar applications.