Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV23)
Publication date: 30th March 2023
The Internet of Things (IoT) underpins our future smart world where electronic devices are integrated with wireless communication. The rapid growth of the IoT ecosystem is expected to lead to one trillion interconnected devices by 2035. Many of these devices will need to be standalone and portable, creating an urgent demand for off-grid power sources. Commercial crystalline silicon (c-Si) photovoltaic (PV) cells have significant potential for recycling indoor artificial light to perpetually power the wireless electronics that form the basis of the IoT.1 However, c-Si PV cells are optimised to work efficiently under sunlight, whose spectral output is very different to that of artificial light sources. Ambient indoor sources, where the frontrunner is white light-emitting diode (LED) lighting, emit solely in the visible wavelength range. Moreover, c-Si PV cells perform poorly in low-intensity diffuse light (ca. 100 μW cm−2) - characteristic of indoor lighting - due to significant Shockley-Read-Hall recombination.2
In this work we demonstrate a new approach to compensate for the limitations of c-Si PV cells for indoor PV based on a new class of photonic material called luminescent waveguide-encoded lattices (LWELs). LWELs consist of a thin (ca. 1 mm) luminescent polymer film encoded with a patterned array of discrete waveguides. The waveguide array is formed through the self-trapping of incident beams of light within a photopolymerisable matrix.3,4 This results in the formation of polychromatic cylindrical waveguide channels permanently inscribed within the polymer matrix, and can impart LWELs with an exceptionally wide field-of-view (80% enhancement shown previously).4 In addition, the conversion of incident light via photoluminescence is used to match the spectral response of the underlying PV cell to indoor lighting. In this process, high-energy photons are absorbed by a lumophore and re-emitted at lower energies, better matched to the bandgap of the PV cell.5
In this talk, the combination of waveguides and luminescence downshifting in LWELs will be explored, namely the unique optical properties of LWEL layers and their performance when integrated with PV cells.
This work was supported by the EPSRC (Grant EP/V048953/1) and the Isaac Newton Trust.
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International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) is celebrated yearly in May. The main topics are the development, function and modeling of materials and devices for hybrid and organic solar cells. The field is now dominated by perovskite solar cells but also other hybrid technologies, as organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells and their integration into devices for photoelectrochemical solar fuel production.
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