Passive radiative cooling for crystalline silicon solar cells

Abstract

Passive Radiative cooling as a no energy consumption cooling method has been turned out to be a broad application potential. Common commercial crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cell arrays suffer working efficiency loss due to incident light loss and heating, which were attractive to wide research. In this work, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) mixed with silica particles difunctional radiative cooler used for crystalline silicon solar cell is proposed. It takes place of glass encapsulant cover efficiently realized both high performance antireflective and radiative cooling. Through theoretical calculations, designed radiative cooler exhibited 94% of emissivity in radiative cooling wave band and 93.4% of transmittance in crystalline silicon solar responding wavelengths. The radiative cooler effect leads to a significant temperature decrease of a bare c-Si solar cell. A 9.5C decline is achieved and a 4.28% of operating efficiency loss was avoid. The design thought of high-quality solar cell radiative cooler in this work may have great application potential in the future.