Simulation of the Effects of Geometry on Performance of Luminescent Solar Concentrator Photovoltaic Devices

This computational study presents the influences of device geometry, including shape, size, and thickness, on the performance of luminescent solar concentrator photovoltaic (LSC-PV) devices. LSC-PV device optical performance was simulated for 8 different device shapes: circular, regular triangular, pentagonal, hexagonal, square, and three rectangular with varying aspect ratios, with 10 different surface areas from 1 cm² to 1 m², and 10 different thicknesses from 0.2 to 5 cm; for 11 different concentrations, 10–110 parts per million (ppm), of 4 different organic dyes. Each of the LSC-PV devices employs monocrystalline silicon PV cells. The irradiance, as well as spectral distribution of irradiance received by the PV cells, has been simulated by means of Monte Carlo ray tracing to calculate the electrical power and power conversion efficiencies. The results show that triangles, pentagons, and hexagons have better optical performance than squares or circles. Furthermore, the optical internal loss of the LSC-PV device is positively correlated with the device size in which edge performance is relatively poor in larger size devices, and increasing lightguide thickness has a limited impact on the edge performance of the planar LSC-PV devices. Higher dye concentrations and greater stokes’ shifts of the dyes led to more significant edge emissions. The best performance of 3.24% was attained for 1-cm-thick, 100 cm² small triangular units suitable for matrix-dense packing, using 110 ppm of LR305 dye with a high photoluminescence quantum yield (95%) and a relatively large stokes shift (29 nm).