TY  - BOOK
AU  - Jain, Prince
AU  - K.R. Ravi
TI  - Fabrication of Transparent Hydrophobic Coating on Glass Substrate for Solar Panel Application
U1  - 620.112 3 
PY  - 2020///
CY  - IIT Jodhpur
PB  - Department of Metallurgical & Materials Engineering
KW  - Hydrophobic Coating on Glass Substrate
KW  - MTech Theses
KW  - Department of Metallurgical & Materials Engineering
N2  - Accumulation of dust on the solar panel cover glass from windstorms, industrial areas, construction sites, and agricultural lands block the incident light radiation to reach the working part of the solar cell. Consequently, it leads to a decrease in conversion efficiency and makes the solar cell inefficient. The present work aims to address this problem by fabricating self-cleaning coatings based on the lotus effect, where a surface is endowed with micro-nano scale surface roughness and low surface energy wax coatings.To make these coatings suitable for the solar panel cover glass application, it should possess optical transparency and mechanical robustness. Hence, merely increasing the roughness will increase the hydrophobic behavior of the coatings. But will have negative impacts on the application of the coatings for solar panel cover glass application.Therefore, an equilibrium among the parameters must be achieved to achieve the competitive properties of optical transparency, hydrophobicity, mechanical stability for self-cleaning solar cell applications.The present work demonstrated the Fabrication and characterization of hydrophobic aluminum oxide coatings on the glass surface. The coatings were fabricated through five stages: 1) preparation of aluminum oxide sol, 2) deposition of the sol on the substrate via spin coating, 3) Annealing, 4) hydration, and 5) low surface energy modification through silane treatment. The fabricated surface was amorphous and hydrophobic, with a static water contact angle of 136˚. The graded refractive index structure of the coatings (~1.325),10 nm surface roughness, and sub-micrometer thickness of ~ 90 nm facilitated the coatings to acquire optical transparency. In addition to that, the coatings maintained their hydrophobic behavior up to 320 °C thermal treatment. Beyond that, the coatings lost their non-wettability property, owing to the desorption of silane molecules. Further, the coatings remained stable in the chemical environment of pH value 5, with nearly 10° decrease in their contact angle values from their initial value, thereby enabling the fabricated hydrophobic glass substrate to be effectively useful for self–cleaning cover glass zapplications

ER  -