Design and Development of Transparent Luminescent Solar Concentrator using Mixed Rock Salt and Polymethyl Methacrylate

doi: 10.14456/mijet.2022.26

Abstract

Silicon-based solar cells are opaque that would limit other benefits of using besides generating electric dc power. As a result, transparent solar cells (TSCs) have been developed to overcome those limitations. However, TSCs usually have complicated manufacturing processes and difficulty in developing the high efficient light absorbing and reflection materials, and therefore having high cost. This research presents design and development of the low cost rock salt based transparent luminescent solar concentrators (TLSCs) which could be used as TSCs. The developed TLSCs utilized the electro-chemical reaction with special salt solute with 36% concentration. This solute was injected into the cell grids made of Poly Methyl Methacrylate sheets with width, length and thickness of 5x5x1.8 cm. The properties of the developed cells were tested in comparison with the conventional crystalline based cells. The open circuit voltage of both cells had the highest values at the room temperature and decreased when the temperature increased but retained constant after tested longer than 60 minutes. The short circuit current for both cells had values changing propositionally to the change of the solar concentration levels. The short circuit current of the silicon-based cells decreased by 15.79% while the proposed cells decreased only by 8.00%. In addition, when combined the two types of the cells in series and parallel connection, it was found that the theoretical power of the cells when connected in parallel provided higher power compared to when connected in series. Enhancing higher efficiency and less cost would be the big challenge for the future work regarding this proposed solar cell.