Advanced Photonic Thin Films for Solar Irradiation Tuneability Oriented to Greenhouse Applications.

The world population is growing by 1 billion people every 10 years. There will come a time when there will be more people to feed but less land to grow food. Greenhouses can be the solution to this problem because they provide the highest production yield per m and also use less water, provide food safety, and offer high quality.

Design and realization of transparent solar modules based on luminescent solar concentrators integrating nanostructured photonic crystals.

Herein, we present a prototype of a photovoltaic module that combines a luminescent solar concentrator integrating one-dimensional photonic crystals and in-plane CuInGaSe (CIGS) solar cells. Highly uniform and wide-area nanostructured multilayers with photonic crystal properties were deposited by a cost-efficient and scalable liquid processing amenable to large-scale fabrication. Their role is to both maximize light absorption in the targeted spectral range, determined by the fluorophore employed, and minimize losses caused by emission at angles within the escape cone of the planar concentrator.

Ceramic barrier layers for flexible thin film solar cells on metallic substrates: a laboratory scale study for process optimization and barrier layer properties.

Flexible thin film solar cells are an alternative to both utility-scale and building integrated photovoltaic installations. The fabrication of these devices over electrically conducting low-cost foils requires the deposition of dielectric barrier layers to flatten the substrate surface, provide electrical isolation between the substrate and the device, and avoid the diffusion of metal impurities during the relatively high temperatures required to deposit the rest of the solar cell device layers. The typical roughness of low-cost stainless-steel foils is in the hundred-nanometer range, which is comparable or larger than the thin film layers comprising the device and this may result in electrical shunts that decrease solar cell performance.