Modeling photon transport in fluorescent solar concentrators

Fluorescent solar concentrators (FSC) can concentrate light onto solar cells by trapping fluorescence through total internal reflection. In an ideal FSC, the major obstacle to efficient photon transport is the re-absorption of the fluorescence emitted. In order to decompose the contribution of different photon flux streams within a FSC, the angular dependent re-absorption probability is introduced and modeled in this paper. This is used to analyze the performance of different FSC configurations and is also compared with experimental results. To illustrate the application of the modeling, the collection efficiency of ideal devices has also been calculated from the re-absorption probability and is shown to be useful for estimating non-ideal losses such as those due to scattering or reflection from mirrors. The results also indicate that among the FSCs studied, the performance of those surrounded by four edge solar cells is close to ideal. The rapid optimization of FSCs has also been presented as another practical application of the models presented in this paper