Circular luminescent solar concentrators

Luminescent solar concentrators offer the ability to architecturally integrate solar energy harvesting devices into the urban environment. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel LSC design that utilises flexible bifacial silicon 'sliver' solar cells. Circular LSCs were fabricated which allowed testing of both fluid and solid waveguides. Use of non-fluorescent silica nanoparticles as light scatterers revealed that a significant amount of light can be totally internally reflected to the edges of an LSC via light scattering alone. This leads to the concept of "frosted glass" LSCs, which may be useful where a large amount of light transparency is not required. Finally, flexible polymer polydimethlysiloxane (PDMS) based LSCs were also investigated using fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy to probe fluorophore distribution in LSCs showing how non-uniform dispersion can reduce device performance. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.