LSC: the windows that collect energy

When we talk about solar energy’s collection we soon think to the classic solar panels for the electricity production or, alternativelly, to the solar thermal for the production of sanitary warm water.

By the way, in the future, the solar panels will be forgotten due to the usage of a new technology. We are talking about the creation of glasses made by particles that take the name of luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) and they can be coloured or semi transparent.

It’s to think how such glasses can be used not obly, banally, in the hardware of houses, offices and public places, but even in the cars, in the electronic devices and so on.

The electricity is at the basement of the planet’s functioning: let’s think about a window that produce the heating for your house; let’s think about a windshield or a carwindow of your car that produces the needed electricity to switch it on; let’s think about a smartphone that charges itself thanks to the solar energy.

The LSC panels

A future governed by those roles is not so utopian. If all of this is possible,it’s just thanks to the Luminescent solar concentrator, even called LSC and still unknown by many.

The experts believe that this so small particle, but highly technological, would create a real technological revolution.

It will bring solar energy to not being any more a energy source for few idealists and wealthy, but a reality largely spread, massive.

How do they work?

The Luminescent solar concentrators have a really easy functioning, already understandable by the name. It is really thin sheets of a material which is meanly transparent plastic where there are some particular particles.

They have the ability to catch the sun rays, changing their wavelenght and to emit it inside the plastic sheet. This thanks to their property fluorescence.

From here the step is really easy: on the edges of the LSC’s sheet there are some classic solar cells, as we always imagined them, able to catch the rays and to convert them in energy.

An analogy really easy to understand even for the not experts, could be the one to squeeze a wet cloth in a basket.

The wet cloth is the LSC’s sheet, while the basket when the water is collected are the solar cells.

Unlike what everyone can think, it isn’t a recent discovery. The first experiments on the LSC dates back to the years ’70.

The Researches Center Eni for the Renewable Energies and the Environment, with the headquarter in Novara presented firstly the possible usages of this technology to the last Maker Faire which took place in Rome.

Technological research

The molecules that made the panels were found in nature, anyway, in the last years the purpose of the researches were the one to improve their properties.

They were, infact, lightly changed. The main aspect on which they focused were the pigmentation. Like we know, more darker is the colour more is able to catch the sun light.

This were made keeping in consideration the fact that they were creating a material to be used on the windows et simila.

For this reason, the transparence is the essential characteristic that the material must have.

The relationship with the nature

The most important support come from the realization of a LSC sheet coloured with a bright red which doesn’t affect the chlorophyll photosynthesis of the plants.

This will allow, in the future, to grow the plants on a surface that, meanwhile, is able to produce energy which could even supply the irrigation’s implants, or the lighting ones, for example.

All of it without that the two things are incompatible between each other, due that the current solar implants have the big flaw to negativelly affect the soil under them.

This post is also available in: Italiano