ACEP Solar Team Publishes Paper on Solar Panel Coatings for Snow Shedding

It’s a slippery slope! Solar panels shed snow like never before. 

ACEP’s solar technology program team members Chris Pike and Erin Whitney were part of a team of researchers, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technology Office, who recently published a paper in the journal Advanced Materials Technology. The paper describes recent work developing and testing coatings that improve the snow shedding of solar panels. Other authors on the paper included colleagues from the University of Michigan, Michigan Technology University, and Sandia National Laboratory.

The coatings were developed by colleagues at the University of Michigan and tested outdoors in Alaska by the ACEP Solar Technology Program. They are some of the first surfaces that require low detachment forces and enable passive ice shedding over a wide range of accretion areas. 

The paper, titled "Facilitating Large-Scale Snow Shedding from In-Field Solar Arrays using Icephobic Surfaces with Low-Interfacial Toughness" can be found here.

To see the technology in action and hear more about ACEP’s solar program, check out this informative ACEP video.

For more information on solar panel coating technology, we encourage you to also check out PV Magazine’s recent article on the technology.

 

Erin Whitney applies a snow shedding coating for testing at the Renewable IPP solar array in Willow, Alaska. Photo courtesy of Erin Whitney.