Assessing the performance of sustainable luminescent solar concentrators based on chemically recycled poly(methyl methacrylate)†

Abstract

Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) is the most commonly used host material for luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs), both in the form of thin films and slabs. Assuming industrial production of LSCs, the amount of polymeric material placed on the market would be considerable, raising questions about the sustainability of the approach. One option to avoid this scenario is to use chemical recycling processes for PMMA, from which a high-purity monomer, suitable for a new polymerization reaction and considerably less impactful in terms of global warming potential (GWP), is regenerated. In this paper, we propose the use of chemically regenerated methyl methacrylate (r-MMA) for the production of bulk LSC plates containing the state-of-the-art fluorophore Lumogen F Red 305 in a range of concentrations from 200 to 500 ppm. The performance of these devices and their chemical, thermal and mechanical properties are found to be equivalent to those obtained from commercially available virgin MMA, despite the impurities inherently present in r-MMA. However, these latter are detrimental to LSCs’ lifetime due to the photodegradation reactions they trigger. However, further purification of the regenerated monomer would allow the sustainability benefits of the production process to be exploited without sacrificing long device lifetimes.