Luminescent Solar Concentrator with Advanced Structure for Reabsorption Loss Suppression and Synergistic Energy Harvesting

Abstract

As large‐area and optically transparent photon harvesting devices, luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) are promising candidates for building‐integrated photovoltaics owing to their high transmittance and resistance to shadowing effects existing in solar cells. Up to now, there are still many challenges in the practical application of LSCs: 1) Reabsorption loss is inevitable during photoluminescence transmission due to indirect illumination of solar cells in LSC system. 2) Satisfactory energy harvesting cannot be achieved in rainy conditions due to the substantial attenuation of the incident light intensity. 3) Evaporation residue on the surface of LSCs leads to device performance degradation. Pioneering researches and feasible strategies for reabsorption loss suppression, energy harvesting in rainy days as well as self‐cleaning property are still lacking demonstration. In this work, reabsorption loss is suppressed based on advanced structural LSCs with universally applicable optical spacer layer. Then the integrated LSCs with droplet‐based electricity generator (DEG) are proposed for the first time. Such DEG‐LSCs not only realize synergistic harvesting of solar and raindrop energy, but also possess self‐cleaning properties. Finally, a self‐powered temperature and humidity sensing system is designed and demonstrated to provide feasible ideas for the practical application of DEG‐LSCs in self‐powered intelligent buildings.

Preparation of liquid silicon‐based carbon dots and application for luminescent solar concentrators

“…The waveguide substrate receives a large area of sunlight, and the fluorescent material converts the absorbed sunlight into fluorescence, which is transmitted to the side solar cell to achieve photoelectric conversion [17,18]. Compared with opaque silicon solar cells, LSCs have high transparency and good color characteristics, which allows them to replace glass curtain walls as a window for solar energy collection [19]. In addition, LSCs have low sensitivity to directional angle and do not suffer from efficiency loss caused by the shadow effects of photovoltaic devices [20] Finally, LSC based on liquid silicon-based CDs was assembled by spin coating, which has a good transparency of up to 80%.…”