Polymethylmethacrylate-based luminescent solar concentrators with bottom-mounted solar cells

Abstract Luminescent solar concentrators offer an attractive approach to concentrate sunlight economically without tracking, but the narrow absorption band of luminescent materials hinders their further development. This paper describes bottom-mounted luminescent solar concentrators on dye-doped polymethylmethacrylate plates that absorb not only the waveguided light but also the transmitted sunlight and partial fluorescent light in the escape cone. A series of bottom-mounted luminescent solar concentrators with size of 78 mm × 78 mm × 7 mm were fabricated and their gain and power conversion efficiency were investigated. The transport process of the waveguided light and the relationship between the bottom-mounted cells were studied to optimize the performance of the device. The bottom-mounted luminescent solar concentrator with cell area coverage of 9% displayed a cell gain of 1.38, to our best knowledge, which is the highest value for dye-doped polymethylmethacrylate plate luminescent solar concentrators. Power conversion efficiency as high as 5.03% was obtained with cell area coverage of 27%. Furthermore, the bottom-mounted luminescent solar concentrator was found to have a lowest cost per watt of $1.89 with cell area coverage of 18%. These results suggested that the fabricated bottom-mounted luminescent solar concentrator may have a potential in low-cost building integrated photovoltaic application.