Optimum design of V-trough solar concentrator for photovoltaic applications

Abstract

This paper presents a novel design of V-trough Solar Concentrator (VSC) for low concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) applications. The conventional VSC design comprises of two flat reflectors slanted by an angle and attached to a PV module. The maximum reported concentration ratio (CR) and optical efficiency (OE) of this concentrator are 2x and 89.91%, respectively. This paper demonstrates the process of improving the VSC. The geometrical and optical performance of the conventional VSC were optimized by the theoretical image technique. The experimental CR and OE are increased by 43.50% and 4.32%, respectively. Then, a crossed V-trough design "Pyramid" is suggested to increase the concentrated radiation. Pyramid concentrator boosted the CR, but the OE is dropped. Eventually, a new VSC geometry is proposed and resulted in CR of 4.70x and OE of 91.83%. The new design demonstrates the possibility of obtaining the same CR using a smaller reflector area than conventional and pyramid V-trough configurations, leading to a reduction in production cost. The results show the potential to further improve this type of solar concentrator for photovoltaic applications.

Hybrid photovoltaic-thermoelectric system using a novel spectral splitting solar concentrator

“…1 shows schematic diagram of the novel hybrid PV-TE system. The structure of the concentrator is the same as the OVSC described in [53], except that the aluminium (AL) mirrors are replaced with dichroic mirrors (DM), which enables light splitting. By using such a DM concentrator, the sunlight in the visible spectrum will be directed to a PV cell by reflection and the infrared spectrum will pass through and fall on a thermal absorber that converts light into heat for a TE module, enabling efficient utilization of solar energy over its full spectrum.…”

“…In addition, the use of commercial flat mirrors makes it impossible for direct adoption of the configuration of crossed compound parabolic concentrators (CCPC) [31,51,52]. Consequently, the structure of a modified V-trough solar concentrator (VSC) is employed, which is referred to as the "Onagraceae VSC" (OVSC) because its double-trough configuration looks like Onagraceae flowers [53]. In this work, we report a novel PV-TE hybrid system based on dichroic-mirror OVSC to concentrate the visible light to a PV cell and infrared radiation to a TE generator.…”

A new configuration of V-trough concentrator for achieving improved concentration ratio of >3.0x

“…The light uniformity, U, of a concentrator is a measure of uniform light distribution in terms of the intensity over the absorber area. It can be evaluated using [52][53][54],…”

“…The theory described in section 2 was employed to determine the geometrical concentration ratio, CR geo and the aspect ratio (L/W ab ) of concentrators for a given φ. To simplify the design procedure, this study focuses on the cases of operating under normal irradiance of light (i.e., α = 0 • ) [52]. Since the PV cell to be used in this study has a dimension of 10 mm × 10 mm, the width of the absorber of the VSCs was fixed to 10 mm (i.e., W ab = 10 mm).…”

Numerical Investigation of a Solar PV/T Air Collector Under the Climatic Conditions of Zarqa, Jordan

“…Al-Najideen et al tested a novel double V-trough solar concentrator (DVSC) with CR greater than three suns. It is found that the PV power increased five folds at a reflector tilt angle of 71° (Al-Najideen et al 2019). Another experimental investigation was recently carried out in India on a mirror integrated PV system (MIPVS).…”