Luminescent solar concentrator photovoltaic designs

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of designing products using luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) photovoltaic (PV) technologies. The focus is on the integration of LSC PV technologies in PV modules, future products and buildings. It is shown that the typical material properties of LSCs — low cost, colorful, bendable, and transparency — offer a lot of design freedom. Two differently designed LSC PV modules with back contacted solar cells are presented including ray-tracing simulations and experimental results resulting from their prototypes. It is shown that the efficiency of a LSC PV module can be 5.8% with a maximum efficiency of 10%. Further the results of a design study which focused on product integration of LSC PV technologies are presented and discussed. In total 16 different and highly innovative conceptual designs resulted from this project, which were prototyped at scale to show their feasibility and integration features.