Superhydrophobic self cleaning nanostructures for solar panel cover glass applications

Abstract

Dust accumulation on the cover glass of solar panels from transport vehicles, newlineindustrial chimney wastes and pollution inhibits the incident light photons to reach newlinethe active part of the solar cell and consequently reduces the output electrical newlinepower. The present research is aimed to overcome this problem by developing newlinetransparent self cleaning superhydrophobic coatings on solar panel cover glass. newlineInspired from the combination of micro-nano structured roughness and low surface newlineenergy wax crystals on the surface of sacred lotus leaves, self cleaning newlinesuperhydrophobic coatings were fabricated on the glass substrates. To use such newlinesuper hydrophobic self - cleaning coatings for solar panel applications, the coating newlineshould possess optical transparency and mechanical robustness. Increasing the newlinesurface roughness leads to improvement in superhydrophobic property as well as newlineacting as a deteriorating source for scattering incident light radiation (reduction in newlineoptical transmittance) and poor mechanical stability. Hence, careful control over the newlinesurface roughness is essential to achieve the competitive properties of transparency, newlinemechanical robustness and superhydrophobicity for self cleaning photovoltaic newlineapplications The present work deals with the fabrication and characterization of ZnO newlinenanorods, ZnO nanowalls and aluminium oxide nanoflakes based superhydrophobic newlinesurfaces. ZnO nanorods and ZnO nanowalls were fabricated on glass substrates newlineusing Successive Ionic Layer Adsorption and Reaction (SILAR) Chemical Bath newlineDeposition (CBD) and spin coating - sonochemical method, respectively. Similarly, newlinealuminium oxide nanoflakes coating on glass substrate was created by the combined newlineuse of spin coating hydration technique. All the fabricated nanostructured newlinesurfaces were modified with silane solution to achieve low surface energy newline newline