Design and development of ITO/Ag/ITO spectral beam splitter coating for photovoltaic-thermoelectric hybrid systems

ITO/Ag/ITO (IAI) multilayer coatings were designed for spectral beam splitter applications and these coatings were deposited on glass substrates by magnetron sputtering method. The thicknesses of the component layers, namely, Ag and ITO were varied to achieve high visible transmittance, high NIR-IR reflectance and optimum cut-off wavelength. The optimized ITO/Ag/ITO exhibits high visible transmittance (∼88%) and high NIR-IR reflectance (>90%) with an optimum cut-off wavelength (∼900 nm). A novel chemical etching method was used to improve the transmittance of the plain glass substrate. The optimized IAI multilayer coating deposited on single side etched glass substrate resulted in increase in transmittance (∼91%), which is due to the nano-porous morphology of the etched glass substrate. The angular and polarization dependence studies of IAI multilayer coatings were also studied in detail.