Improved optical performance of hydrophobic silica nanoparticles as antireflection coating on glass and its electrical performance for photovoltaic module applications

Antireflection coatings (ARCs) on an optical substrate appear to be highly effective for reducing reflectance for optical and photovoltaic (PV) panel applications. In this perspective, we have prepared and investigated the performance of silica nanoparticles (SNPs) ARC through a sol–gel process for the PV module applications. The ∼160-nm-thick sol–gel prepared SNPs have been coated on a glass substrate using the spin coating technique. The further vapor-phase treatment of hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) on silica-coated glass results in contamination-resistant due to the existence of trimethylsilyl groups. The resultant-coated glass exhibits improvement in transmission by ∼3 % while reducing the refractive index value up to 1.17. The solar cell tested undercoated glass notifies the increase in current density of 34.24 to 35.17 mA / cm2 and improves the overall efficiency up to 3.13% as compared to the untreated glass. The results obtained in our study suggest an important future direction for the use of HMDS-treated SNPs in an outdoor PV module and solar collector applications.