Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 27, 2025
Fabrication of High Contrast Gratings for the Spectrum Splitting Dispersive Element in a Concentrated Photovoltaic System
Published on: July 18, 2015
Construction of highly efficient carbon dots-based polymer photonic luminescent solar concentrators with sandwich
Wei Xin1, Jianying Wang1, Bing Xu1
1Key Laboratory for the Green Preparation and Application of Functional Materials, Ministry of Education, Collaborative Innovation Center for Advanced Organic Chemical Materials Co-constructed by the Province and Ministry, Hubei Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hubei University, Wuhan 430062, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
The enhancement of photoluminescence (PL) emission and waveguide play a key role in improving the optical efficiency of luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs). In this work, to boosting PL emission and waveguide simultaneously, one photonic crystal (PC) structure (crystalline colloid arrays (CCAs)) was introduced into carbon dots (CDs)-based polymer LSCs. A sandwich-structured CDs-based polymer photonic LSC, comprising glass/CDs-based polymer PC film/glass, was created. First, CDs-based colloidal crystal suspensions were prepared by co-assembly of monodispersed p(MMA-NIPAm) colloids and multicolor-emitting CDs in HEMA monomer induced by the evaporation-driven assembly. The obtained suspensions not only had uniform PL and structural colors, but showed enhanced PL emission. Second, the above suspensions were sandwiched between two glass sheets and finally a photonic polymer LSC with sandwiched structure (25 × 25 × 1.8 mm3) were formed via one-step photopolymerization technique. Remarkably, the optimal CDs-based polymer photonic LSCs with sandwiched structure not only had high transparence at visible range (>60%), but exhibited PL emission enhancement (at least 2 times). Furthermore, the maximum external optical efficiency (η) of 5.84% could be achieved based on yellow-emitting CDs-based polymer photonic LSC. The high external optical efficiency was mainly attributed to the PL emission enhancement and good PC waveguide.
