New Publication from the SUNLAB: Progress in Photovoltaics
SUNLAB researchers, including lead author PhD candidate Gavin Forcade, in collaboration with researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke, the French Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) and in part supported by collaborators from STACE, recently published new results in Progress in Photovoltaics. They investigated an antireflection coating consisting of a monolayer of close-packed silica microbeads partially submerged within a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) encapsulant, for concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) submodules. Comparing to a commercialized SiOx encapsulant for a reference 500x CPV submodule, they measured a 2.6% higher short-circuit current. In addition, they performed a series of simulations and predicted further improvements up to 3.4% for smaller beads with a deeper submergence.
This work demonstrates the ability of the microbeads/PDMS encapsulant to improve the performance of present CPV modules, thereby promoting further study to incorporate the encapsulant commercially.
Find out more details in this article in Progress in Photovoltaics.
G. P. Forcade, A. Ritou, P. St-Pierre, O. Dellea, M. Volatier, A. Jaouad, C. E. Valdivia, K. Hinzer, and M. Darnon, Microstructured antireflective encapsulant on concentrator solar cells, Prog. Photovoltaics: Res. Appl. (2021). DOI: 10.1002/pip.3468