Abstract
Sunlight concentration is essential to reach high temperatures of a working fluid in solar-thermal applications and to reduce the cost of photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation systems. Commonly, sunlight concentration is realized by parabolic or cylindrical reflectors, which do not provide uniform concentration on the receiver finite surface. Uniform concentration of sunlight is favored especially for the PV conversion applications since it not only enhances the conversion efficiency of sunlight but also reduces the thermal variations along the receiving PV cell, which can be a performance and life-span limiting factor. In this paper a reflector profile that uniformly infiltrates the concentrated sunlight into the receiving unit is attempted. The new design accounts for all factors that contribute to the nonuniform concentration, like the reflector curvature, which spatially reflects the sunlight nonuniformly, and the angular dependency of both the reflector reflectivity and the sunlight transmission through the PV cell.
© 2014 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Max Schmitz, Fabian Dähler, François Elvinger, Andrea Pedretti, and Aldo Steinfeld
Appl. Opt. 56(11) 3035-3052 (2017)
Rabi Ibrahim Rabady, Mohamed Al-Fandi, Mohammad Khasawneh, Abeer Andrawes, and Yahia Makableh
Appl. Opt. 57(10) 2441-2445 (2018)
Zhengbo Zhu, Le Yang, and Donglin Ma
Appl. Opt. 62(15) 3822-3828 (2023)