LAUSR

Advanced optical concepts, making use of tailored micro-structured front cover glasses, promise to reduce the losses encountered with encapsulated solar modules. However, implementing optical concepts into the conventional architecture of encapsulated solar modules and simultaneously maintaining high durability represents a severe technological challenge. The liquid glass technique offers a route to meet this challenge by enabling the implementation of these optical concepts directly into the durable front cover glass of solar modules. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time two showcases of texturing fused silica front cover glass, using the facile liquid glass technique: (I) multi-functional micro-cone textures that reduce front-side reflection losses by ~80 % compared to a planar reference and exhibit strong hydrophilic behavior facilitating self-cleaning; and (II) embedded freeform surface cloaks that redirect incident light away from the metallic contact grids of the solar cell and demonstrate a cloaking efficiency of ~88 %.