Building Integrated Photovoltaic System for a Solar Infrastructure: Liv-lib’ Project

The growing importance of sustainability and passive house design requires the reconsideration of integrating the solar PV modules in both buildings and architectural design processes. The architectural integration of photovoltaic systems is one of the fundamental themes of contemporary architecture to optimize efficiency while taking into account the proportions, morphology and aesthetics of the project. The direct conversion of solar energy into electrical energy using photovoltaic systems appears to be a consolidated technology of exploitation of renewable energy sources. In addition to the availability of the source, its characteristics are its reliability and that it needs low maintenance. In this paper, we present, as a case study, a solar canopy specially designed for the Liv-lib’ project at Solar Decathlon Europe 2014. Canopy's shape was designed to maximize the performance of the solar conversion by integrating in series two innovative solar technologies, Luminescent Solar Concentrators (LSC) and Copper Indium Gallium diSelenide (CIGS) solar cells. LSC are constituted by slabs of transparent materials (PMMA) doped with a fluorescent dye that captures a fraction of the sun rays passing through the panel. The dye molecules then re-emit light at a longer wavelength inside the slab which, due to the total internal reflection, traps and guides this light toward its edges. Strips of solar cells are optically coupled to the edges and convert into electric energy the light gathered by the slab. Liv-lib’ is a self-sustainable passive house run by University Paris-Est, thanks to the joint work of staff and students from “ENSA Paris-Malaquais”, “ESTP”, “ESIEE Paris”, and “Chimie ParisTech” with academic and industrial partners, among which, for the LSC, the Department of Physics and Earth Sciences of the University of Ferrara.