The development of renewable energy sources is of vital importance, not only in the fight against climate change but also in securing the energy supply. In this context, solar technologies are already playing an essential role in the shift towards carbon-neutral economies, while ensuring a reliable and competitive energy supply. The durability and performance of solar components are crucial to increase the reliability and output of solar power plants and ultimately reducing the cost of electricity. Both the glass used as the front cover of photovoltaic modules and the absorber tubes of parabolic trough collectors currently include anti-reflective (AR) coatings; however, these coatings have not yet convincingly demonstrated their durability in the field, and there are reasonable doubts about their resistance against abrasion. Also, coatings with anti-soiling (AS) functionality are now being explored and laboratory-scale developments are being carried out on coatings with passive cooling functionality that bring higher efficiency and longer service lifetime to PV modules by reducing their operating temperature. Unfortunately, these developments are still far from demonstrating relevant improvements and even further away from demonstrating the required durability.
In this work, this issue has been addressed through an innovative approach, developing a process that is not a conventional coating at all, but is based on a combination of micro and nano-structuring of the glass surface itself, which provides the three functionalities mentioned above, far exceeding the characteristics of any of the current solutions: anti-reflective (AR) with an improvement of more than 2.3%, anti-soiling (AS) with a reduction in the rate of soiling of 48% and passive cooling, with cooling peaks of up to 2.5 ºC. In addition to these significant improvements over the current state of the art, the most relevant aspect of the development is the quantitative improvement in its durability, thanks to the innovative technique of structuring the glass surface itself, which does not involve any added material and maintains the mechanical properties of the surface. Thus, this structured glass applied to solar technology will result in a reduction of the LCOE, favouring the transition towards a sustainable energy model and displacing the use of fossil fuels.
We present three optical multi-channels spectrometers for the interrogation of label-free biosensors based on different kinds of transducers : resonant nanopillars (RNP), microring resonators (MRR), localized and propagative surface plasmon resonance (LSPR and SPR). Light is collected from the multi-channel biosensors (up to 12-channels) with optical fibers and is remapped to a packed straight line forming the input slit of the spectrometers. The combination of high resolution CMOS sensors and embedded signal processing makes it possible to extract the resonant wavelengths of the transducers with a precision in the range of 1-20 pm depending on the type of transducer. The performance of the three transducer / spectrometer systems has been evaluated in the framework of EU and regional projects for the monitoring of chemical pollutants found in oceanic waters (FP7 - EnviGuard), crop health monitoring (Interreg France-Wallonie-Vlaanderen - SmartBioControl/BioSens) and bioreactor monitoring (EutoTransBio - APTACHIP).
Ana López-Hernandez, Rafael Casquel, Miguel Holgado , Iñaki Cornago, Fátima Fernández, Paula Ciaurriz, Francisco Sanza, Beatriz Santamaría, Maria Maigler, María Fe Laguna
In recent works it has been demonstrated the suitability of using resonant nanopillars (R-NPs) as biochemical. In this work it has been shown the capability of the R-NPs to behave as label-free multiplexed biological sensors. Each R-NP is formed by silicon oxide (SiO2) and silicon nitride (Si3N4) Bragg reflectors and a central cavity of SiO2, and they are grouped into eight arrays called BICELLs, which are distributed on a single chip of quartz substrate for multiplexing measurements. For the biological sensing assessment it was developed an immunoassay on the eight single BICELLs. The biofunctionalization process was performed by a silanization protocol based on 3-aminopropyltrymethoxysilane (APTMS) and glutaradheyde (GA) as a linker between APTMS and the IgG which acted as biorreceptor for the anti-IgG recognition. In this work, there were compared two forms of immobilization: on one hand by incubating the R-NPs under static drop of 50 μg/mL and on the second hand by introducing the sensing chip in a flow cell with a continuous flow of the same concentration of IgG. The eight arrays of R-NPs or BICELLs were independently optically interrogated by a bundle of fiber connected to a spectrometer. The multiplexing analysis showed reproducibility among the BICELLs, suggesting the potentially of using R-NPs for multiplexed biosensors. Performance in the immobilization process apparently does not have a signification effect. However the election of one method or another should be a commitment between time and resources.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.