Fabrication of high-performance luminescent solar concentrators using N-doped carbon dots/PMMA mixed matrix slab

Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) as alternatives to solar cells are suitable for photovoltaic windows. Generally semiconductor quantum dots are employed as emitters for LSC fabrication due to their advantages such as photostability, spectral tunability, and high photoluminescence quantum yield. In this paper, we used low cost and environmentally friendly N-doped carbon-dots (N-CDs) as phosphors to fabricate N-CDs/PMMA slab based luminescent solar concentrators. The high-performance N-CDs/PMMA slab based LSCs with an external optical efficiency of 12.23% could be achieved when the concentration of N-CDs within the PMMA matrix is 0.08 wt%. Our results showed that N-CDs/PMMA slab based luminescent solar concentrators make the practical use of LSCs more feasible because of the unique properties of N-CDs.