Future buildings might sustainably generate their own power with luminescent solar concentrators

When imagining a greener future, Luís Carlos and Rute Ferreira envision a cleanly powered city with solar panels imbedded into the windows and walls of skyscrapers. Such a future could be possible with luminescent solar concentrators, or LSCs, which redirect incoming light to side channels where they can be used to generate energy. Since they are highly transparent, LSCs could be used on windows and building façades without changing their appearance.

“The building sector is the world’s largest consumer of energy,” said Ferreira. “With improved performance, using LSCs could provide substantial long-term benefits to reduce energy consumption habits.”

However, LSCs are traditionally made from materials that have a high environmental impact, such as quantum dots, synthetic dyes and lanthanide complexes. To help researchers advance alternative LSCs, Carlos and his colleagues provide their perspective on the future path of LSCs with environmentally friendly materials.

In their perspective, Hernández-Rodríguez et al. summarize organic molecules from renewable and natural materials, such as carbon and silicon quantum dots, that could replace synthetic organic dyes in LSCs. The perspective also covers standing issues in the field, such as the low photostability of many organic compounds that leads to a deterioration in performance over time, and approaches to improve the efficiency of LSCs needed for large-scale usage.

“This perspective provides an integrated multidisciplinary view of the field,” said Carlos. “We hope to help the LSC commercialization process; contribute to attracting new players to the field; and spur collaboration between photochemists and photobiologists; chemical, materials science, and photonic engineers; and entrepreneurs.”

Source: “A perspective on sustainable luminescent solar concentrators,” by M.A. Hernández-Rodríguez, S. F. H. Correia, R. A. S. Ferreira, and L. D. Carlos, Journal of Applied Physics (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0084182 .