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This Crystal Clear Solar Cell Can Turn A Whole House With Windows Into A Power Station

Production of solar energy from cells placed around luminescent materials is very old.

Trials, attempts have only resulted in failures and worse results – the energy production was not sufficient and the materials were solid colored.

Now Dr. Lunt and his co-workers at Michigan State University have produced a transparent luminescent glass that uses small organic particles to absorb particular invisible wavelengths of sunlight.

“We can tune these materials to pick up just the UV and the near-IR wavelengths that then ‘glow’ at another wavelength in the IR,” explained Dr Lunt, who has supervised and authored the paper in the journal Advanced Optical Materials. 

The ‘glowing’ IR light is shifted so that it deflects to the edge of the luminescent object where it is transformed into electricity by strips of photovoltaic solar cells. “Because the materials do not absorb or emit light in the visible spectrum, they look exceptionally transparent to the human eye,” Dr Lunt said, the technology is still at the developmemt stage though. “It opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a non-intrusive way. It can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader. Ultimately we want to make solar harvesting surfaces that you do not even know are there,” Dr Lunt said. “More work is needed in order to improve its energy-producing efficiency.” The colored luminescent solar concentrator has the best efficiency of 7%, which is very much larger that what Dr. Lunt's transparent solar concentrator which is 1%. Though the scientists have set a target to reach efficiencies beyond 5.