Red and yellow emissive carbon dots integrated tandem luminescent solar concentrators with significantly improved efficiency

Abstract

Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) can collect solar light from a large area and concentrate it on their small-area edges mounted with solar cells for efficient solar-to-electricity conversion. Thus, LSCs show huge promise for realizing building-integrated photovoltaics because of their semi-transparency and light weight. However, the low optical efficiency of LSCs becomes a great obstacle for their application in real energy conversion. Herein, yellow emissive carbon dots with a record-breaking ultrahigh quantum yield of up to 86.4% were prepared via a simple hydrothermal approach using low-cost precursors. By combining them with red emissive carbon dots (quantum yield of 17.6%), a large area (∼100 cm²) tandem LSC was fabricated. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the large-area carbon dot-integrated tandem LSC reaches up to 3.8%, which is among the best reported in literature for a similar lateral size of LSCs. In particular, the tandem structure based on two laminated layers is novel, and is fit for the real structural application of keeping windows warm, where two glass slides are usually used. The high-efficiency tandem LSC using eco-friendly carbon dots as fluorophores paves way for real applications of LSCs.