Study on degradation of optical properties of shipping solar cell cover glass

Solar cell is one of the core components in photovoltaic systems. The key issue of the photovoltaic system is the photovoltaic conversion efficiency, which not only depends on the conversion efficiency of the semiconducting silicon, but also is closely related to the transmittance of the cover glass. The photovoltaic conversion efficiency will definitely decrease with the attenuation of spectral transmittance. This study used marine solar panels as the research object to investigate optical attenuation regularity and surface damage characterization of the cover glass through the simulation of marine environment. The evolutions of output characteristics of solar cell have been obtained by a series of experiments. The results showed that the marine environment has a great effect on the output characteristics of the solar cell. The corresponding analysis and discussion has been conducted and presented in the paper.