Electrostatic Dust Removal Using Transparent Conductive Nano-Textured Surfaces for Efficient Light Harvesting

Dust accumulation is a major operational challenge faced in light harvesting, such as the photovoltaics industry. Removing dust using water-based cleaning is expensive and unsustainable. Dust repulsion via charge induction is one of the most promising ways to clean solar panels and recover power output without consuming a single drop of water. However, it is still challenging to remove particles smaller than 10μm, which comprise a significant fraction of dust, because the Van der Waals force of adhesion dominates electrostatic force of repulsion. Here we propose nano-textured, transparent, electrically conductive glass surfaces to significantly enhance electrostatic dust removal for particles smaller than 10μm. We performed AFM pull-off force experiments and demonstrate that nano-textured surfaces reduce the force of adhesion and that the reduced adhesion results in significantly better electrostatic dust removal compared to plain or micro-textured surfaces. We fabricate transparent, electrically conductive, nano-textured glass that can be retrofit on light harvesting devices using copper nano-mask based scalable nano-fabrication technique and show that we can recover 90% of lost power output for particles smaller than 10μm.