Greener Luminescent Solar Concentrators with High Loading Contents Based on in Situ Cross-Linked Carbon Nanodots for Enhancing Solar Energy Harvesting and Resisting Concentration-Induced Quenching.

A luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) is composed of loaded luminophores and a waveguide that can be employed to harvest and concentrate both direct and diffused sunlight for promising applications in solar windows. Thus far, most of efficient LSCs still relied on the heavy-metal-containing colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) dispersed into a polymer matrix with a very low loading (typically <1 wt %). Such low-loading constraint is required to mitigate the concentration-induced quenching (CIQ) and maintain high optical quality and film uniformity, but this would strongly reduce the light-absorbing efficiency.