Designs for photovoltaic glass surface texturing to improve transmittance and minimize glare

Abstract

Planar glass cover creates optical reflection loss and glare, which is harmful to energy efficiency and effective operation of PV modules, especially at larger angles of incidence (AOIs). Textured surfaces can reduce reflections and glare intensity. In this work, three textured glass surfaces are described and simulated numerically over a wide range of AOIs. The anti-reflection effect and light trapping effect are provided to analyze the transmission gain across a wide range of AOIs. The reflection times is proposed to assess the anti-glare effect of the textured surfaces. It is found that the hexagonal array structured surface exhibits the highest transmission gain and anti-glare effect. The optimized hexagonal array structured surface could improve the average transmission by ∼5% relative to planar surface for AOIs of 0°-80°. In addition, the reflection times is doubled, which helps to diminish the reflection and glare intensity.