In:
Journal of Materials Chemistry C, Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Vol. 9, No. 36 ( 2021), p. 12255-12262
Abstract:
Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) are large-scale sunlight collectors, consisting of fluorophores embedded in waveguides, which can concentrate part of the absorbed sunlight at the borders of the slab through wave-guided photoluminescence. Benefiting from their low-cost and semi-transparency, they exhibit great potential for building integrated photovoltaics. Among various types of fluorophores, carbon quantum dots (C-dots) have attracted great interest due to their relatively high quantum yield (QY), low-cost, non-toxic composition and simple synthetic methods. Unfortunately, most red-emitting C-dots with high QYs were synthesized using relatively toxic and expensive precursors. The C-dots exhibiting red-emission synthesized using sustainable precursors ( e.g. citric acid) have QYs less than 20%. Here we synthesized the red-emitting C-dots produced by using citric acid and urea as precursors and N , N -diethylformamide as the solvent via a solvothermal reaction. The red C-dots have a broad absorption from 300–650 nm, with a QY as high as 40% in ethanol. In addition, the C-dots exhibited good biocompatibility, even for a C-dot concentration up to 1000 μg mL −1 . The LSC (LSC area 100 cm 2 ) based on red C-dots exhibited a solar-to-electricity power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 1.9% under natural sunlight illumination (35 mW cm −2 ). We combined red-emitting C-dots with green-emitting C-dots prepared via a vacuum heating approach. By using a tandem structure, composed of two slabs each incorporating a different C-dot type, the obtained PCE of the LSC based on the combination of red and green C-dots further increases up to 2.3% (under the same irradiance equal to 35 mW cm −2 ), which is comparable to the reported PCEs for the LSCs based on C-dots or other types of fluorophores. This work indicates that the red-emitting C-dots produced by low-cost and environmentally-friendly precursors exhibit great potential as building blocks for the environmentally compatible LSCs.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
2050-7526
,
2050-7534
Language:
English
Publisher:
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
Publication Date:
2021
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2702245-6
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