Solar Panel Glass Reflection: Fresnel Loss & AR Coating

Before a single photon reaches a solar cell, it has to survive the front glass — and some of it never does. This simulator models that first, easily-overlooked loss with a real single-layer thin-film Fresnel calculation: set the sun's elevation and the panel's tilt to control the angle of incidence, tune the glass refractive index, and toggle a quarter-wave anti-reflective coating on and off. A 3D panel tracks the sun in real time while streams of photons arrive from the light source — some bouncing away as reflected loss, the rest absorbed into the glass — and live readouts report the angle of incidence, reflectance, transmitted irradiance and the resulting electrical output in watts, so you can see directly how a coating (or a bad mounting angle) changes what a panel actually collects.