Optical and Electrical Characterisation of a 3D-printed Luminescent Solar Concentrator

Capener, Richard and Manning, Jake and Itrych, Piotr and Baldock, Sara J. and Danos, Lefteris (2026) Optical and Electrical Characterisation of a 3D-printed Luminescent Solar Concentrator. Optical Materials, 175: 118045. ISSN 0925-3467

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Abstract

A Luminescent Solar Concentrator (LSC) was fabricated using stereolithography (SLA) 3D printing by doping a commercially available liquid resin with the widely used Perylene Red dye. The LSC was optically and electrically characterised through optical spectroscopy and current-voltage electrical measurements. Its performance was found to be comparable to that of an injection-moulded LSC with a similar dye concentration. We demonstrated that the transparency of the printed resin improved significantly following a sanding and polishing process, with only minimal bulk scattering contributions, as determined through optical measurements. The approach was successfully scaled up by fabricating a larger LSC, confirming the viability of 3D printing as a flexible and accessible method that enables fast, low-cost fabrication for research-scale LSC development. This is the first demonstration of an LSC fabricated via 3D printing, showing promising results and highlighting the potential of this approach as a flexible research tool for optimising LSC performance.