Ambient condition curable, highly weather stable anti-soiling coating for photovoltaic application

Abstract

Photovoltaic conversion technologies took the opportunity to trap the abundant solar energy, but soiling reduces these device's energy yield. In this endeavor, we developed a novel anti-soiling coating with excellent weather stability to counter the challenges posed by soiling. The developed anti-soiling coating characteristics like ambient condition curablity, good mechanical and weather stability to encounter the real field conditions are because of the bonding of functionalized hybrid Zr-O-Si network with the glass. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, FTIR, and Raman spectroscopy analysis indicate the presence of the functionalized hybrid Zr-O-Si network in the coating. The coating exhibited good thermal stability up to 150 °C and observed a minimal decrement of < 4° in the water contact angle over 100 h. The coating's weather stability was analyzed by adapting IEC 61646 standards for 1500 h with a temperature range of 85 °C & -40 °C and maximum relative humidity of 85% and the coating was found to be more stable than commercial anti-soiling coating. The developed coating shows no loss in angle resolved transmission in the range of 10–80°. The coated panel showed an excellent anti-soiling effect and a net reduction of 24.5 % in the soiling losses are observed compared to that of the not-coated panel over 50 days. The developed coating is combination of different unique characterstics such as, scalable coating technique, ambient condition curability, good mechanical, weather stability and anti-soiling properties that distinguish this work from prior state of the art.