Low reabsorption and stability enhanced luminescent solar concentrators based on silica encapsulated quantum rods

Abstract

Luminescent nanocrystals (NCs) based luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) are promising as a new concept for solar energy collection. The reabsorption behavior and the stability are two critical issues for the luminophores in LSCs. Here low-loss LSCs are demonstrated based on silica encapsulated CdSe (core)/CdS (shell) quantum rods (QRs) (QR@silica) with a large effective Stokes shift over 170 nm for the first time. For improving compatibility with polymer matrix and enhancing stability, QRs are encapsulated into silica shells by reverse microemulsion method. The QR@silica LSCs are fabricated by doctor-blading printing process achieving two-layer structure to reduce the reabsorption from the LSCs configuration aspect. Moreover, the self-assembly of QR@silica on the top surface of LSCs leads to more luminescent light from the QRs propagate along the horizontal direction thus improving the edge efficiency of LSCs. Benefiting from the low reabsorption of QRs, two-layer structure and the alignment of QR@silica, the edge efficiency of LSCs has reached as high as 87%, which is 4 times higher than that of silica encapsulated CdSe quantum dots (QDs) (QD@silica) LSCs in the same configurations.