Abstract
Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) have attracted significant attention as promising solar energy conversion devices for building integrated photovoltaic (PV) systems due to their simple architecture and cost‐effective fabrication. Conventional LSCs are generally comprised of an optical waveguide slab with embedded emissive species and coupled PV cells. Colloidal semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have been demonstrated as efficient emissive species for high‐performance LSCs because of their outstanding optical properties including tunable absorption and emission spectra covering the ultraviolet/visible to near‐infrared region, high photoluminescence quantum yield, large absorption cross sections, and considerable photostability. However, current commonly used QDs for high‐performance LSCs consist of highly toxic heavy metals (i.e., cadmium and lead), which are fatal to human health and the environment. In this regard, it is highly desired that heavy metal‐free and environmentally friendly QD‐based LSCs are comprehensively studied. Here, notable advances and developments of LSCs based on unary, binary, and ternary eco‐friendly QDs are presented. The synthetic approaches, optical properties of these eco‐friendly QDs, and consequent device performance of QD‐based LSCs are discussed in detail. A brief outlook pointing out the existing challenges and prospective developments of eco‐friendly QD‐based LSCs is provided, offering guidelines for future device optimizations and commercialization.
Highlights
PV materials and devices, for instance, these PV materials and cells can’t achieve rather high efficiencies as compared to the Si solar cells, for example, the record power conversion efficiency (PCE) of quantum dots (QDs)-based solar cell is ≈12%.[8]
In the last few years, QDs have been demonstrated as excellent emissive fluorophores and were widely used to fabricate high performance Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs).[17e,21a] most of these high-efficiency LSCs are based on QDs with heavy metals such as CdSe/ZnS QDs, PbS/CdS QDs, Pb-based perovskite QDs, etc.[18c,31] For instance, Meinardi et al fabricated a large-area CdSe/CdS core/shell QD-based LSCs with no re-absorption loss, which showed an optical efficiency higher than 10%.[32]
ZnS precursors into AgInS2 QDs, which resulted in AgInS2 QDs and AgInS2/ZnS core/shell QDs with high photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 22% and 60%, respectively.[75a]. These results suggest that ternary eco-friendly QDs show excellent optical properties including high PLQY and
Summary
The state-of-the-art LSCs are generally defined as a device consisting of an optical waveguide made of transparent polymer incorporated with luminescent materials and coupled with PV cells.[10a]. Device stability is very important to evaluate the performance of LSCs. With the development of LSCs, the optical efficiency and PCE are still restricted by several loss mechanisms as follows: i) The emitted light from phosphors which is escaped from the waveguide rather than the light guided to the four small faces through TIR. In order to overcome these loss mechanisms of LSCs, novel emissive fluorophores with outstanding optoelectronic properties including high PLQY, large Stokes shifts, optimal absorption/emission spectrum range and long-term photostability are highly desired to achieve high efficiency LSCs, which hold great promise in future net-zero building-integrated photovoltaic applications
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