Photon upconversion facilitated molecular solar energy storage

Energy Transfer Enhancement of Photon Upconversion Systems for Solar Energy Harvesting

Enhancing Solar Cell Efficiency Using Photon Upconversion Materials

Photovoltaic cells are able to convert sunlight into electricity, providing enough of the most abundant and cleanest energy to cover our energy needs. However, the efficiency of current photovoltaics is significantly impeded by the transmission loss of sub-band-gap photons. Photon upconversion is a promising route to circumvent this problem by converting these transmitted sub-band-gap photons i...

Photoswitchable Molecular Rings for Solar-Thermal Energy Storage.

Solar-thermal fuels reversibly store solar energy in the chemical bonds of molecules by photoconversion, and can release this stored energy in the form of heat upon activation. Many conventional photoswichable molecules could be considered as solar thermal fuels, although they suffer from low energy density or short lifetime in the photoinduced high-energy metastable state, rendering their prac...

Photoelectrochemical Solar Energy Storage Cells

Although society’s electrical needs are largely continuous, clouds and darkness dictate that photovoltaic solar cells have an intermittent output. A photoelectrochemical solar cell (PEC) can generate not only electrical but also electrochemical energy and provide the basis for a system with an energy-storage component (PECS). Sufficientlyž energetic inQ1 solation incident on semiconductors can ...

Photon energy upconversion in porphyrins: one-photon hot-band absorption versus two-photon absorption

We study the porphyrin S1 ! S0 fluorescence and the photosensitized singlet oxygen Dg ! Rg phosphorescence, both originating from absorption of photons with energy less than the porphyrin S0 ! S1 transition energy. By measuring the excitation intensity dependence of fluorescence at lowered sample temperatures, we are able to discriminate between two parallel processes of one-photon hot-band abs...