What Are the Characteristics of Glass in Solar Panels?

When choosing a solar panel brand, people usually carefully study topics such as the efficiency and wattage of solar photovoltaic panels. An often overlooked issue is the type of solar panel glass. Most solar system users only pay attention to the solar panels, but they do not know that the quality of the glass will largely affect the efficiency of the solar panels.

In fact, solar panel glass is one of the important barriers to protect solar photovoltaic cells from external factors such as water, steam and dust.

Material of Glass

The panel glass used in solar photovoltaic cell components is tempered glass with low iron content, ultra-white glossy or suede surface. Smooth glass is also called float glass, and suede glass is also called rolled glass. The thickness of commonly used solar panel glass is generally 3.2mm and 4mm, and the thickness of building-type solar photovoltaic modules is 5-10mm.

Regardless of the thickness, the light transmittance of the glass is required to be above 90%, and the wavelength range of the spectral response is 320～1100nm.

Glass Manufacturing Process

Low iron means that the iron content of this glass is lower than that of ordinary glass, thus increasing the light transmittance of the glass. Because of the lower iron content of this kind of glass, it is whiter than ordinary glass from the edge.

In order to reduce the reflection of sunlight, this kind of glass carries out an anti-reflection treatment on its surface by physical and chemical methods, making the glass surface fluffy and increasing the amount of light incident, but also has a self-cleaning light incident.

Some solar power manufacturers also use sol-gel nanomaterials and precision coating technology, such as magnetron sputtering and double dip methods, to coat a layer of nanomaterial film on the solar glass surface. This kind of coated glass can not only significantly increase the light transmittance of solar panels and reduce light reflection, but also have self-cleaning functions, which can reduce the pollution of rainwater and dust on the solar panel surface.

The toughening treatment is to increase the strength of the glass and resist the impact of wind, sand and hail, thus playing a long-term role in protecting solar cells. The tempering treatment of the panel glass is to heat the glass through a horizontal tempering furnace and quickly cool it with cold air to form a uniform compressive stress on the surface, which effectively improves the bending and impact resistance of the glass. After tempering the panel glass, the strength of the glass can be increased by 4 to 5 times than that of ordinary glass.

Now you know the panel glass will have a significant impact on the solar energy system. Therefore, choosing high-quality glass will help you get a higher return on investment.