Flexible luminescent solar concentrators utilizing bio-derived tandem fluorophores

Abstract

In this work we aim to investigate flexible luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) for the purpose of portable power generation. We will focus on Surelight® PE-610, which is a tandem fluorophore consisting of R-Phycoerythrin and Rhodamine, as well as PbSe nanorods, as the luminescent species. The luminescent quantum yield, LQY, of PE-610 was measured as 53% in buffer solution, and 75% when deposited in a thin-film. Computational simulations show that a 25cm by 25cm LSC with a 0.1mm thick thin-film containing PbSe nanorods, a LQY of 70% and a substrate thickness of 3mm has an optical efficiency of 4.5±0.1%. An identical LSC with a 0.5mm thick substrate had an optical efficiency of 1.7±0.1% meaning substrate thickness is a key factor for flexible LSCs. A primary advantage of PE-610 as a LSC material is that it is bio-derived, and therefore cheap and abundant. The PbSe nanorods have the advantage of a broad absorption spectrum, though the LQY used is still speculative at this time

Limitations and design considerations for donor–acceptor systems in luminescent solar concentrators: the effect of coupling-induced red-edge absorption

“…Strong reabsorption limits the mean path length of waveguided photons, and drives losses through nonradiative decay and outcoupling [7]. Organic donoracceptor systems have long formed an important part of efforts to reduce reabsorption in LSCs and were investigated in some of the earliest LSC studies, as well as more recently [19][20][21][22]. Donor-acceptor systems comprise two or more chromophores that form an energy cascade for photogenerated excitations.…”

Investigations into flexible ultrathin multi-level micro-optics using femtosecond laser pulses

“…The form factor is critical to enable a plethora of new emerging applications for both consumer and industry market. Currently, FP is being integrated into equipment or products for imaging and display [10,11,29,30,53], metrology [15,54,55], energy harvesting devices [9,56], and photonic circuits [50,57] (see Zone plate based lenses comprise of alternating transparent and opaque zones to achieve both amplitude and phase modulation for wavefront shaping. This approach has been implemented on various materials such as silica [58], aluminium film [20], graphene [21,37], gold [59], However, the incident light was reflected or absorbed by the opaque zones in both these approaches, which drastically reduce the focusing efficiency of the lens.…”

“…The rapid progress in the FIP development in the past several years indicate the importance and significance of this technology. The advancement in the technology are evident, and different levels of maturity regarding device operation and implementation have been demonstrated[9,11,119,15,29,30,50,53,54,56,57]. Although tremendous efforts have been devoted to developing ultrathin planar lenses, it is still challenging to achieve micro-optical lenses with few hundreds of nanometres thickness, and low-cost manufacturing which are physically flexible or stretchable.Photon sieve and meta surface based lenses have gained widespread interest, but they are bound with manufacturing limitations that cannot be taken lightly.…”