Antireflective and self-cleaning glass with robust moth-eye surface nanostructures for photovoltaic utilization

Abstract Omnidirectional and broadband antireflection (AR) self-cleaning coatings are crucial for the performance enhancement of photovoltaic (PV) modules. Herein, we demonstrate biomimetic moth-eye structures on glass through inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching process using thermal dewetted copper nanoparticles as the masks. Moreover, the etched glasses are chemically treated to strengthen the nanostructures. The moth-eye glass exhibits excellent AR effects with a reflectance below 3% over the wavelength range from 570 to 950 nm. As the incident angles of the light increasing from 0o to 60o, the relative improvement of the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of PV module with moth-eye glass produces a dramatically increases from 4.6% to 9.9%, compared with that of PV modules with flat glass. Additionally, the moth-eye glass also possesses superhydrophilic self-cleaning and antifogging abilities, which are attractive for outdoor applications.