Volume 1: Energy Innovations: Accelerated Deployment, New Concepts, and Emerging Technologies

Experimental Investigation of Dust Particle Deposition Reduction on Solar Cell Covering Glass by Super-hydrophobic Coatings Hao Lu, Li-zhi Zhang

Abstract

Airborne dust deposition on energy device would cause a lot of problems, such as solar PV panels. Mechanical cleaning using water is still the main method to mitigate dust deposition damage. This paper aims to investigate dust deposition reduction on solar cell covering glass with and without super-hydrophobic coating by experimental measurement. The effects of different tilt angles of PV panels were studied in details. The patterns of dust deposition on different glass samples, deposition density, transmittance reduction and PV efficiency reduction by dust deposition were investigated in the experiments. The deposition density on the coated surface is just 44.4%, 28.6 % or 11.2 % of the bare surface for tilt angle θ=30°, θ=45° or 60°, respectively. Therefore, it can be concluded that super-hydrophobic coating with micro-nano structures can be an effective way to mitigate the dust deposition on solar PV panels.

Keywords Dust deposition, Super-hydrophobic coating, Transmittance, PV efficiency, Tilt angle