Fabrication of Highly Transparent and Cost-Effective Soda Lime Glass with Antireflective Nanostructures Using Silver Ink

Highly transparent single-side subwavelength structures (SWSs)-integrated glass for low-cost antireflective glass are fabricated. Using the silver ink and a RIE process, various SWSs on soda lime glass are fabricated simply and cost-effectively. The fabricated SWSs have different distributions and shapes as the silver ink ratio. The average transmittance (T_avg), solar-weighted transmittance (SWT), and angle-dependent transmittance values of bare and SWSs-integrated glasses for investigation of optical properties are measured. The SWSs sample with a silver ink ratio of 33% exhibited good T_avg and SWT compared to the samples with silver ink ratios of 25 and 50%. This shows that the T_avg and SWT values can be attained with the soda lime glass are higher compared to those attained using bare glass, over a broad spectral range and a wide incident angle range. As results, optical properties of glass and the performance of photovoltaic (PV) modules can be enhanced by integrating SWSs. The fabricated SWSs-integrated glass is mounted on the top of PV modules for economical coverglass. The PV module with the SWSs-integrated coverglass shows efficiency of 36.6% and the enhanced efficiency at all angle of incidence compared to that without coverglass. It indicates that the highly transparent glasses with SWSs can be used for low-cost antireflective glasses such as large-scale framed glasses for pictures, optical lens, displays, LEDs, and other optoelectronic devices as well as PV modules.