Design, Construction and Testing of Solar Concentrators for Solar Energy Experiments

Undergraduate research experiments were performed with the aim of building, testing and and optimizing luminescent solar concentrators as well as designing a Learning Module for a Summer Physics Camp based on results. A luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) is a transparent piece of plastic or glass with fluorescent dye or quantum dots embedded or painted on it. The dye absorbs incident light and then fluoresces creating a glow that propagates by total internal reflection (light entering the panel bounces between the faces) to the edge of the sheet where the light is absorbed by a narrow solar cell. This technology is promising because it allows a large collecting area of virtually transparent glass with a comparatively small area of expensive solar cells. In this work, the base material for our LSC consists of several rectangular pieces of clear and colored transparent acrylic. Using diamond scribes, solar cells were carefully diced and connected to line the edges of the acrylic. The output current and voltage of the solar cells were messured using digital multimeters to calculate power output. Measurements under controlled intensities of light were made using different colors of acrylic sheets and the use of different dyes to add color to clear sheets and the results compared. Results of these experiments will be discussed. A Learning Module based on this work and used as a component of solar-energy experiments in a summer physics camp for middle schoolers is also presented.