Enhancing the efficiency of luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs)

Recent developments in the endeavor to enhance the efficiency of luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) are presented in this paper along with an analysis of LSC devices. In recent years, several experimental and numerical research works have been carried out to improve the performance of LSCs in different ways. LSCs date back to the 1970s and comprise an extremely interesting notion of solar cells for various reasons. First, LSCs are cost-competitive and function in diffuse light, and as such, it is not necessary to use expensive solar tracking devices. Second, luminescence facilitates the cells to gather only cold light, which results in higher PV efficiency. LSCs generally consist of transparent polymer sheets doped with luminescent species. The luminescent species absorb incident sunlight and emit it with high quantum efficiency, such that the emitted light is trapped in the sheet and travels to the edges where the solar cells can collect it. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.