Comprehensive Glare Hazard Analysis of Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) Based Frontsheet for Flexible Photovoltaic Applications

Photovoltaic (PV) panel installations in buildings and transportation hubs pose additional safety challenges as the glare from the panels can impose adverse impacts like flash blindness in human eyes. This study substantiates that polymer encapsulated thin film modules offer significantly low glare levels that are essential for building integrated and transport hub installations. In this work, the glare hazard potential associated with matt ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE)-based polymer sheet used as the frontsheet for the production of flexible thin amorphous silicon (a-Si) PV modules is studied and compared with standard PV glass used in crystalline silicon (c-Si) PV panels. The specular reflectance extracted from the measured total and diffuse reflectance for an angle of incidence (AOI) of 8° and the angular intensity distribution (AID) of specular reflectance measured for AOI ranging from 10° to 80° are utilized for glare assessment of the frontsheets. The mean value of specular reflectance extracted from the measured total and diffused reflectance is as low as 0.5% for the polymer frontsheet and is 4% for glass. The AID measurements suggest that the reflection from the polymer frontsheet is highly diffusive in nature in contrast to glass and the measured specular reflectance is always close to a magnitude lower than that from glass for all AOI. With the increase in AOI, the specular AID reflectance increases exponentially for glass to become as high as 40%, which is almost 20 times less than that from the polymer frontsheet for an AOI of 80°. Further, the c-Si test structure with glass and thin a-Si PV module with matt ETFE-based polymer as frontsheet showed similar specular reflectance trends as that of glass and the polymer frontsheet, respectively.