Optical enhancement for luminescent solar concentrators

Chunhua Wang; Roland Winston; Weiya Zhang; Dave Pelka; Sue Carter

doi:10.1117/12.863250

19 August 2010 Optical enhancement for luminescent solar concentrators

Chunhua Wang, Roland Winston, Weiya Zhang, Dave Pelka, Sue Carter

Proceedings Volume 7785, Nonimaging Optics: Efficient Design for Illumination and Solar Concentration VII; 77850D (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.863250
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

A luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) generally is a sheet of highly transparent materials embedded with luminescent materials. Incident sunlight is absorbed by the luminescent materials, and then emitted through down conversion process at longer wavelengths. A large portion of the emitted light is trapped in the sheet and travels to the edges where photovoltaic solar cells are attached. In this study, we investigate the optical enhancement methods for LSCs with different sizes mainly by using optical gel and white diffuser. The largest tested LSC is up to 1.2m in length and with geometrical gain 64. This is, as we know, the largest reported size. It yields electrical gain 3.9 by optical enhancements. And the optical efficiency is still as large as 10%. The study shows that the enhancement by white diffuser is more sensitive to the size of the LSCs than that of the optical gel. Such enhancement drops with the increase of the sizes of LSC, but tends to plateau at certain size.

Citation Download Citation

Chunhua Wang, Roland Winston, Weiya Zhang, Dave Pelka, and Sue Carter "Optical enhancement for luminescent solar concentrators", Proc. SPIE 7785, Nonimaging Optics: Efficient Design for Illumination and Solar Concentration VII, 77850D (19 August 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.863250

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