Nanophotonic Luminescent Solar Concentrators

TL;DR

This paper explores how nanophotonic structures can significantly enhance the efficiency of luminescent solar concentrators by engineering the photonic local density of states, demonstrating up to 30% improvement in photon flux.

Contribution

It introduces nanocavity LSC structures, specifically bilayer slabs and photonic crystals, showing their potential to improve luminescent flux through photonic engineering.

Findings

Photonic crystal design enhances waveguided luminescence flux by up to 30%.

Finite-difference time-domain simulations validate flux improvements.

Potential for up to tenfold increase with further photonic engineering.

Abstract

We investigate the connection between photonic local density of states and luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) performance in two manufacturable nanocavity LSC structures, a bilayer slab and a slab photonic crystal. Finite-difference time-domain electromagnetic simulations show that the waveguided luminescence photon flux can be enhanced up to 30% for the photonic crystal design over a conventional LSC operating in the ray optic limit assuming the same number of excited lumophores. Further photonic engineering could realize an increase of up to one order of magnitude in the flux of waveguided luminescence.