Predicting the performance of photonic luminescent solar concentrators

Conventional luminescent solar concentrators (LSC) suffer from losses due to the escape cone of total internal reflection and reabsorption. Embedding the luminescent dye in a photonic crystal influences the emission process and improves the light guiding efficiency, thus increasing the overall light collection efficiency. Additionally, the absorption of incident light can be enhanced inside such structures. By combining all these different effects in an analytical model, the overall performance of such a photonic luminescent solar concentrator is calculated. We show for a multilayer photonic crystal and a typical LSC dye that our concept reduces light guiding losses by 60%. For application-relevant concentrator dimensions, the overall efficiency can be improved by a factor of 2.4 compared to conventional LSCs.