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The development of renewable energy sources is of vital importance, not only in the fight against climate change but also in securing the energy supply. In this context, solar technologies are already playing an essential role in the shift towards carbon-neutral economies, while ensuring a reliable and competitive energy supply. The durability and performance of solar components are crucial to increase the reliability and output of solar power plants and ultimately reducing the cost of electricity. Both the glass used as the front cover of photovoltaic modules and the absorber tubes of parabolic trough collectors currently include anti-reflective (AR) coatings; however, these coatings have not yet convincingly demonstrated their durability in the field, and there are reasonable doubts about their resistance against abrasion. Also, coatings with anti-soiling (AS) functionality are now being explored and laboratory-scale developments are being carried out on coatings with passive cooling functionality that bring higher efficiency and longer service lifetime to PV modules by reducing their operating temperature. Unfortunately, these developments are still far from demonstrating relevant improvements and even further away from demonstrating the required durability.
In this work, this issue has been addressed through an innovative approach, developing a process that is not a conventional coating at all, but is based on a combination of micro and nano-structuring of the glass surface itself, which provides the three functionalities mentioned above, far exceeding the characteristics of any of the current solutions: anti-reflective (AR) with an improvement of more than 2.3%, anti-soiling (AS) with a reduction in the rate of soiling of 48% and passive cooling, with cooling peaks of up to 2.5 ºC. In addition to these significant improvements over the current state of the art, the most relevant aspect of the development is the quantitative improvement in its durability, thanks to the innovative technique of structuring the glass surface itself, which does not involve any added material and maintains the mechanical properties of the surface. Thus, this structured glass applied to solar technology will result in a reduction of the LCOE, favouring the transition towards a sustainable energy model and displacing the use of fossil fuels.
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