Fabrication of Highly Transparent and Cost‐Effective Soda Lime Glass with Antireflective Nanostructures Using Silver Ink

Abstract

Highly transparent single‐side subwavelength structures (SWSs)‐integrated glass for low‐cost antireflective glass are fabricated. Using the silver ink and a RIE process, various SWSs on soda lime glass are fabricated simply and cost‐effectively. The fabricated SWSs have different distributions and shapes as the silver ink ratio. The average transmittance (Tavg), solar‐weighted transmittance (SWT), and angle‐dependent transmittance values of bare and SWSs‐integrated glasses for investigation of optical properties are measured. The SWSs sample with a silver ink ratio of 33% exhibited good Tavg and SWT compared to the samples with silver ink ratios of 25 and 50%. This shows that the Tavg and SWT values can be attained with the soda lime glass are higher compared to those attained using bare glass, over a broad spectral range and a wide incident angle range. As results, optical properties of glass and the performance of photovoltaic (PV) modules can be enhanced by integrating SWSs. The fabricated SWSs‐integrated glass is mounted on the top of PV modules for economical coverglass. The PV module with the SWSs‐integrated coverglass shows efficiency of 36.6% and the enhanced efficiency at all angle of incidence compared to that without coverglass. It indicates that the highly transparent glasses with SWSs can be used for low‐cost antireflective glasses such as large‐scale framed glasses for pictures, optical lens, displays, LEDs, and other optoelectronic devices as well as PV modules.