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Smart luminescent solar concentrator as a BICPV window

  • Research Article
  • Building Systems and Components
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Abstract

Building integrated concentrating photovoltaic (BICPV) windows have attracted numerous studies in recent years. However, there is a tradeoff between the light transmittance and power generation efficiency in the design of BICPV window. In this paper, a smart luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) is introduced as the BICPV window. The proposed smart LSC system features on the combination of fluorescent dyes with thermochromic materials to enhance photoelectric conversion efficiency as well as form a dynamic response mechanism to ambient solar radiation and environmental temperature. In this study, a BICPV smart window system consists of the waveguide doped with organic dye Lumogen F Red-305 (BASF) and the thermochromic hydrogel membrane has been developed. The research on analytic design parameters is executed through optical simulation by ray tracing technology along with outdoor comparative experiments. From simulations for a smart LSC of 100 mm × 100 mm × 3 mm with a bottom-mounted solar cell of 100 mm × 10 mm, the optical effective concentration is found to be with the range of 1.23 to 1.31 when a highest gain of 1.26 in power over the bare solar cell is obtained from experiments.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the grants from the Key Research and Development Program of Anhui Province, China (No.S202004a07020038), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51908174), Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation, China (No. 1908085QE206).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Building Environment and Equipment, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China

    Ying Nie, Wei He, Xianghua Liu, Zhongting Hu & Haixiang Liu

  2. Qinghai College of Architectural Technology, Xining, 810002, China

    Hancheng Yu

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  1. Ying Nie
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  2. Wei He
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  3. Xianghua Liu
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  4. Zhongting Hu
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  5. Hancheng Yu
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  6. Haixiang Liu
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Correspondence to Wei He or Zhongting Hu.

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Nie, Y., He, W., Liu, X. et al. Smart luminescent solar concentrator as a BICPV window. Build. Simul. 15, 1789–1798 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0896-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0896-x

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