Enhanced electrostatic dust removal from solar panels using transparent conductive nanotextured surfaces

Dust accumulation on solar panels is one of the biggest operational challenges faced by the photovoltaic 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 small particles <30 because Van der Waals force of adhesion dominates electrostatic force of repulsion. Here we propose nanotextured, transparent, electrically conductive glass surfaces to significantly enhance electrostatic dust removal in the small particle size regime. We performed AFM pull-off force experiments and demonstrate that nano-textured surfaces reduce the force of adhesion by up to 2 orders of magnitude. We show that the reduced adhesion results in significantly better (~3.5x) small particle electrostatic dust removal compared to plain or micro-textured surfaces. We fabricate transparent, electrically conductive, nanotextured glass that can be retrofit on solar panel surfaces using copper nano-mask based scalable nanofabrication technique and show that we can recover > 99% of lost power output for particles >30 and recover > 90% of lost power output in the small particle regime.