Abstract
A Luminescent Solar Concentrator (LSC) is a transparent plate containing luminescent material with photovoltaic (PV) cells attached to its edges. Sunlight entering the plate is absorbed by the luminescent material, which in turn emits light. The emitted light propagates through the plate and arrives at the PV cells through total internal reflection. The ratio of the area of the relatively cheap polymer plate to that of the expensive PV cells is increased, and the cost per unit of solar electricity can be reduced by 75%. To improve the emission performance of LSCs, simulation modeling of LSCs becomes essential. Ray-tracing modeling is a popular approach for simulating LSCs due to its great ability of modeling various LSC structures under direct and diffuse sunlight. However, this approach requires substantial amount of measurement input data. Also, the simulation time is enormous because it is a forward-ray tracing method that traces all the rays propagating from the light source to the concentrator. On the other hand, the thermodynamic approach requires substantially less input parameters and simulation time, but it can only be used to model simple LSC designs with direct sunlight. Therefore, a new hybrid model was developed to perform various simulation studies effectively without facing the issues arisen from the existing ray-tracing and thermodynamic models. The simulation results show that at least 60% of the total output irradiance of a LSC is contributed by the light trapped and channeled by the LSC. The novelty of this hybrid model is the concept of integrating the thermodynamic model with a well-developed Radiance ray-tracing model, hence making this model as a fast, powerful and cost-effective tool for the design of LSCs.
Highlights
The luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) is a non-imaging optical device that can concentrate sunlight onto a small area of solar cells to generate electricity
The LSC typically consists of a polymer plate doped with a luminescent material, with solar cells attached to the plate edges
This hybrid approach has the advantages of simplicity derived from the thermodynamic modeling which requires a minimum data input, and flexibility from the ray-tracing approach where different LSC surface geometries under direct and diffuse sunlight can be studied with reduced simulation effort
Summary
The luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) is a non-imaging optical device that can concentrate sunlight onto a small area of solar cells to generate electricity. As described in [13,14], the ray-tracing modeling requires a collection of emission spectra from a luminescent material at various different excitation wavelengths in addition to the dimension, refractive index and extinction coefficient of LSC, quantum yield of dye, light source spectra and light intensity distribution. The simulation time required by the ray-tracing modeling is reduced substantially because this hybrid algorithm uses backward ray-tracing that only traces photons arriving at the target As a result, this hybrid approach has the advantages of simplicity derived from the thermodynamic modeling which requires a minimum data input, and flexibility from the ray-tracing approach where different LSC surface geometries under direct and diffuse sunlight can be studied with reduced simulation effort. The simulated results were in a good agreement with the experimental ones
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