Experimental Investigation of Dust Particle Deposition Reduction in Solar Cell Covering Glass by Super-Hydrophobic Coatings

Airborne dust deposition on energy devices would cause serious efficiency and lifetime reduction, such as solar photovoltaic panels. Mechanical or manual cleaning using water is commonly expensive and frequent. Recently, super-hydrophobic coating becomes a new promising way to mitigate the dust deposition issue on PV panels. However, the property of super-hydrophobic coating on preventing dust deposition on PV panels with different tilt angles has been seldom investigated and remains unclear. Thus, this paper investigated dust deposition reduction in PV panels with and without self-cleaning coating by experimental measurement. The effects of different tilt angles of PV panels and micro–nano-structures of self-cleaning coating on dust deposition behaviors were studied in details. It was found that super-hydrophobic coating can greatly reduce dust deposition density on the solar cell covering glass. The dust deposition density on the surface with super-hydrophobic coating is just 44.4%, 28.6% or 11.2% of the surface without super-hydrophobic coating for tilt angle θ = 30°, θ = 45° or 60°, respectively. The coating with micro–nano-structures can obviously improve the anti-dust ability by 15.3% compared with the coating without micro–nano-structures. The coated glass has obviously higher spectral transmittance and PV efficiency after dust deposition compared to the bare glass case. Therefore, the conclusion can be expressed as super-hydrophobic coating with micro–nano-structures can be an effective way to mitigate the dust deposition on solar PV panels.