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Abstract
Plant leaves are efficient light scavengers. We take a ‘botanical approach’ toward the creation of next-generation photovoltaic cells for urban environments. Our cells exhibit high energy conversion efficiency under indirect weak illumination. We used two features of leaves to improve dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). Leaves feature a cuticle, a covering epidermis, and palisade and spongy cells. Leaves are also carefully arrayed within the plant crown. To mimic these features, we first created a light-trapping layer on top of the solar cells and microscale-patterned the photoanodes. Then we angled the three-dimensional DSSCs to create submodules. These simple mimics afforded a 50% enhancement of simulated daily electricity production. Our new design optimizes light distribution, the photoanode structure, and the DSSC array (by creating modules), greatly improving cell performance.
Highlights
Improved photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation in urban environments demands new approaches to solar cell construction given that the installation environments and illumination conditions differ from those of rural environments where solar plants are usually constructed
Leaves are oriented at an angle to the light, not vertically (Fig. 1). This is because the crown surface area is large and angling limits the light received to that required for photosynthesis
As photosynthesis is a slow chain reaction, the leaf anatomy (Fig. 1) balances the number of incident photons to those consumed by photosynthesis, maximizing collection efficiency
Summary
Plants must adapt to the climate and the environment; they cannot move to escape suboptimal conditions. The light intensity distributions within 200 μm patterned photoanodes of two thicknesses, 15 and 30 μm, in the absence of light-trapping layers, are shown in Fig. 3a for vertical and 45° obliquely incident light. Shown are relative integrated specific powers at all incident angles afforded by the same four-cell-arrayed submodules for (c) 600 μm patterned photoanodes (15 μm in thickness) and (d) 200 μm patterned photoanodes (23 μm in thickness) with or without light-trapping layers. Submodule conversion efficiencies varied by pattern size, light-trapping layer status, and photoanode thickness; in general, efficiency increased as the oblique angle of incident light rose.
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