Facile and robust strategy to antireflective photo-curing coating through self-wrinkling

Abstract We reported a facile and bio-inspired strategy for obtaining antireflective (AR) coating through polymerization-induced self-wrinkling. Upon irradiation of light, the complex wrinkle micro-patterns with different morphologies were generated spontaneously on the surface of coating during photo-cross-linking, which enables the photo-curing coating can decrease reflection. The resulting photo-curing coating exhibits a high transmittance over 90% and low reflection below 5% ∼ 8%, with an efficiency anti-reflection of 4% ∼ 7% compared to the flat blank coating. The successful application of these AR coatings with wrinkles pattern to encapsulate the thin film solar cells results in appreciable photovoltaic performance improvement of more than 4% ∼ 8%, which benefits from the decrease of the light reflection and increase of optical paths in the photoactive layer by the introduction of wrinkling pattern. Furthermore, the efficiency improvements of the solar cells are more obvious, with a remarkable increase of 8.5%, at oblique light incident angle than that with vertical light incident angle