Omnidirectional study of nanostructured glass packaging for solar modules

Abstract

Antireflective light trapping glass nanostructures fabricated by a non-lithographic process are investigated for their angle dependent properties to improve the omnidirectional performance of solar modules. Optical transmission and solar cell module I-V measurements are used to understand the dependence of angular performance of nanostructures in the packaging glass. Nanostructures 100-400 nm in height demonstrate an increase in solar light transmission both for normal as well as oblique incidence and measurements show that a ∼200-400 nm nanostructure height is optimum for solar modules, providing an absolute increase of 1% in the power conversion efficiency at normal incidence and a gain in short circuit current density over a 120 angular cone of solar incidence. This shows that packaging glass texturing can be an important and often-overlooked method to yield substantial gain in solar module efficiency. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.