Highly Efficient and Stable Luminescent Solar Concentrator Based on Light-Harvesting and Energy-Funneling Nanodot Pools Feeding Aligned, Light-Redirecting Nanorods

Abstract

Research on high-efficiency photovoltaic (PV) technologies has consistently improved efficiencies. Yet, laboratory-developed PVs are often far from practical applications due to high material costs. Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) can solve this as they use luminophores to direct light from larger areas to little cell materials. However, simple LSCs have very high intrinsic reabsorption, escape cone, and other losses making their combination with high-efficiency PVs unviable. Therefore, systems composed of randomly oriented light-harvesting donor pools, transferring all excitons to a few light-redirecting acceptors aligned parallel to the PV with drastically reduced losses, have been developed (FunDiLight–LSCs). However, these proof-of-principle systems consisted of rather unstable organic molecules. Herein, a novel photostable FunDiLight–LSC based on nanodots as light-harvesting donors and on nanorods as light-redirecting acceptors is introduced. The energy transfer and funneling efficiency in these dots/rods LSCs exceed 90% with escape cone losses potentially below 8%. As the nanoparticles used for the novel LSC are much more stable, combinations of these nanostructured light-harvesting systems with high-efficiency PV will make applications of such photovoltaics in everyday applications significantly more feasible.