The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project introduces a disruptive solar power-generating window design capable of generating clean, on-site, and abundant electricity directly to commercial buildings and homes. While utility solar energy offers off-site generation to urban centers, up to 10% is lost simply due to heat dissipation. And with evolving legislature imposing stricter requirements on building energy codes, power-generating windows offer to be one of the most promising avenues for attaining net-zero energy levels. We plan to scale-up our laboratory-level power-window technology through close industrial partnerships with individual component manufacturers and customer segments discovered through the I-Corps award. Through initial relationships with window manufacturers, our beachhead market will service large-scale commercial projects in Southern California, shifting the energy landscape toward a future of abundant, clean energy.
This I-Corps project uses improved luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) technology to create a highly efficient power-generating window, indistinguishable from large-area windows. LSCs absorb incident light via nanoscale particles, called luminophores. Luminophores (e.g. quantum dots) are a class of particles that, when exposed to a broad range of light, absorb the high energy portion of the spectrum and re-emit the light again at lower energies - this re-emitted light is known as photoluminescence (PL). The target quantum dot in our innovation consists of InAs/InP/ZnSe - a material that absorbs light across the visible spectrum (400-700nm) and re-emits as PL at wavelengths in the near-infrared (NIR) regime (900-1000nm). As such, the re-emitted light is visibly transparent and well designed for a power-generating window. Luminescent Energy power windows employ an innovation that consists of four fundamental components: (1) a grid of micro-scale silicon solar cells, (2) a polymer waveguide with (3) embedded InAs/InP/ZnSe quantum dot luminophores, and (4) selectively reflecting filters to trap the majority of the photoluminescence generated by the quantum dot luminophores and enable competitive window U-values. Our design has been optimized using experimentally-verified modeling tools, and we have begun fabrication of each of the four device components independently.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
